Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New testament Culture

Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture. By David A. deSilva. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000, 336 pp., $24.99.

There are comparatively few evangelicals who have done scholarly work in the area most commonly known as social-scientific criticism. David deSilva is a notable exception. This book is a primer on four central cultural features of the first century. Readers will recognize similarities between this book and Bruce J. Malina's The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (John Knox, 1981). Three of four models employed by deSilva (listed in the book title) are comparable to three of five models employed by Malina in his book. DeSilva is apparently indebted to the work of Malina and the other scholars of the self-designated "Context Group" (Jerome Neyrey, John H. Elliott, and others), as evidenced by frequent references to their work. But deSilva's book has a markedly different tone, and his method diverges at a number of significant points. Many of these differences are significant for evangelicals who are interested in employing insights from cultural anthropology in their study of the Bible.

In contrast to Malina, deSilva apparently thinks that biblical passages are normative for Christian living. If we were to employ the language of Malina, deSilva might consider these passages to be a "warrant" for a particular action, not merely a "witness" of how people used to live (cf. Bruce J. Malina, "The Bible, Witness or Warrant: Reflections on Daniel Patte's Ethics of Biblical Interpretation," BTB 26 [1996] 82-87). Thus, for deSilva, the NT can be described as "guidance" (p. 87), as an "outline [of] what a just and suitable response would entail" (p. 155), or as what the Bible "calls" us to do (p. 301).

DeSilva refreshingly makes primary source materials (both biblical and extrabiblical) from the first century (or shortly before or after) the foundation for his cultural analyses, rather than studies of modern Mediterranean cultures. The primary sources from which he draws in many cases show that the cultural traits described in modern anthropological studies parallel very closely the values of the first-century Mediterranean world, at least as they relate to those descriptions which are adequately broad (like honor and shame). DeSilva is strong (perhaps strongest) in his interaction with these primary sources. One might quibble with the extent to which he describes the influence of the "dominant culture" (i.e. Hellenism) on Jewish culture both in the Diaspora and in Palestine, but the reader will be impressed by the amount that these broad cultural values represented in the "Hellenistic" writings overlap the cultural values found in the "Jewish" writings (most notably in the areas of honor/shame and kinship).

While allowing for diversity in emphasis and presentation, deSilva does not pit texts against one another. Moreover, he is willing for a text under discussion to correct a model (though he rarely uses the term "model") and painstakingly tries to subsume the model under the text, rather than forcing the text into the model. For example, God's grace "goes far beyond" Seneca's notions of generosity (p. 129); "Jesus is notably more austere on this point [divorce] than his contemporaries" (p, 178); and "the Christian culture drew an impassible line" in limiting sexual relations to the marriage bed (p. 229). Again, the evangelical reader will notice the care with which deSilva avoids the pitfalls of many social-scientific critics who often seem to be coercing unwilling texts to fit into their models.

Unlike many who employ cultural anthropological models in their writings, deSilva's book is mostly free of technical jargon. This should allow the book a wide readership. It is an ideal text to use in a course on NT backgrounds or hermeneutics.

The models employed in deSilva's book are sufficiently broad that applications drawn from these models often yield interpretations similar to those arrived at through grammatical-historical methods (though they are often, for lack of a better word, richer). One senses that as interpreters begin to employ cultural models narrower than those found in this book, the results could diverge more radically from traditional interpretations. In other words, it appears that the use of this method is somewhat limited to broader models and will become increasingly less useful as the models narrow. The NT concept of grace, for example, while being informed by a discussion of how patronage functioned in the Greco-Roman world (pp. 121-56) resists being described only in terms of patron-client relationships. DeSilva is careful to avoid such reductionism throughout his book, which is one reason why the book is so useful.

Though there is no discussion of presuppositions or method in deSilva's book, it is evident that he has presented his insights within an evangelical framework. Cultural analysis holds the potential of enlivening the sometimes dry bones of grammatical-- historical analysis by providing the relational context in which the NT would have been read by its first readers. DeSilva has offered an invaluable introduction to this fascinating area of biblical studies.