Myth of a Gentile Galilee, The

The Myth of a Gentile Galilee. By Mark A. Chancey. SNTSMS 118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, xv + 229 pp., $60.00.

This book is an outgrowth of the author's experience in the recent archaeological fieldwork at the ancient site of Sepphoris located in Lower Galilee in present-day Israel. In particular, Chancey's interest in the subject was sparked, as he states in his preface, by the archaeological evidence he had observed in Galilee and by his subsequent reading about Galilee in treatises by NT scholars. This interest was encouraged by his Ph.D. dissertation supervisors who oversaw his work on the topic, "The Myth of a Gentile Galilee: The Population of Galilee and New Testament Studies."

Chancey covers the following subjects: images of Galilee's population in biblical scholarship (chap. 1), the political and demographic history of Galilee (chap. 2), Galilean communities in the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods (chap. 3), and Galilee and the circle of nations (chap. 4). The aim of Chancey's work is clear when he states, "My primary goal in this study is to bridge the gap between textual studies and archaeology, combining both to provide a more detailed and accurate picture of first-century CE Galilee . . . this work demonstrates that most Galileans in the first century CE were Jews" (p. 4). Thus, Chancey's goal is clear, but he readily admits that he is running against the mainstream of NT scholarship, which holds that first-century AD Galilee was truly a Gentile Galilee. For example, he cites K. W. Clark (Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible [New York: Abingdon, 19621 2.344-47) who suggests that the Jews were but a minority in Galilee: "Shrines to numerous deities must have existed in the larger cities of Gentile Galilee, especially in a Roman town like Tiberias, and would have been found even in more Jewish towns. They represented the normal and traditional worship of the Gentile majority in Galilee."

Though the author admits the preponderance of this opinion, he argues against it and strives valiantly to press his own position that, based upon a re-evaluation of the literary evidence (largely of Josephus and some from the Gospels) and upon his appraisal of the archaeological evidence (sometimes contrary to the evaluation of the excavators), first-century AD Galilee was mainly Jewish. Sometimes Chancey overplays his case. he argues for a differentiation between "Hellenistic" and "Greco-Roman culture" on the one hand and "paganism" (the worship of any deity other than the Jewish God) on the other hand. "One reason that the amount of evidence for gentiles in Galilee has been exaggerated in some recent studies is that evidence of Greco-Roman culture has been misinterpreted as evidence for paganism" (p. 7). Yet Chancey also identifies the Greeks and Romans as being gentiles and pagans when writing about Caesarea Maritima and about its status as "a center of Greco-Roman culture" (with a population "consisting chiefly of Greeks" and a minority of wealthy Jews, according to Josephus (J. W. 2.2.68; 3.409; Ant. 20.175, 178; p. 145). At the same time, Chancey talks about these Greeks as also having pagan cults, and that the evidence for this "is abundant" (pp. 145-46). he further indicates that "|Y|elations between the city's Jewish ana gentile inhabitants were often uneasy" (p. 147; emphasis added).

In the first part of the book, Chancey gives an adequate survey of Jewish literature, especially Josephus, but on the whole he deals less adequately with the Gospels. Further, when he is dealing with the Decapolis cities, his treatment is incomplete in that he does not adequately cover Capitolias, Dium (possibly at el-Husm near Irbid, Jordan) or Philadelphia (even though the latter is only somewhat south of Gerasa, which he does include). His research on the Decapolis city Abila is also sometimes incomplete.

In examining the phrase "Galilee of the Gentiles" in Matt 4:15-16 (a quote from Isa 9:1), Chancey argues that the area was known as just "Galilee" in the Bible generally and in other Jewish documents (pp. 170-74). However, he does not really deal exegetically with the issue of why Matt 4:15-16 includes the quotation or of how Matthew saw the fulfillment of OT Scripture in the coming of Jesus to "Galilee of the Gentiles" to minister to Jews and Gentiles in the whole area, people who had been heavily influenced by Hellenistic and Greco-Roman culture and language.

Despite his claim from archaeology that the evidence for "Judaism is greater than that for paganism," Chancey also says, "we should neither exaggerate its quantity I of the Jewish population] nor minimize the challenge of generalizing about a community's [first-century AD] population from such limited evidence" (p. 118). he concludes that he thinks his analysis of the current archaeological materials and literary evidence of Josephus and the Gospels heavily favors his viewpoint, but he grants that future discoveries could refute his argument (p. 182). Overall, this book presents an interesting thesis. Could we not say that, whatever the exact balance between Jews and Gentiles in the population of first-century AD Galilee, the whole area was heavily influenced by the Hellenistic and the Greco-Roman cultures of the non-Jews?