Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity. Essays in Honour of Peter Richardson. .

Text and Artifact in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity. Essays in Honour of Peter Richardson. Edited by Stephen G. Wilson and Michel Desjardins. Studies in Christianity and Judaism / Etudes sur le Christianisme et le Judaisme No. 9. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses, 2000. 632 pages. Cloth. $69.95.

Festschriften are notoriously difficult to review. This volume, which honors Peter Richardson on his 65th birthday, is no exception. Richardson devoted his scholarly life to the interpretation of Paul, the complex relationships of Jews and Christians from ca. 30-130, and to Herod the Great. The thirty contributors to this book, all recognized scholars, respect that fact in the topics they chose to discuss. Space prohibits listing them alt by name here.

This Festschrift set a challenging goal before its contributors: to see how artifacts aid in interpreting texts, and texts artifacts. The results are mixed. The contributions fall into five areas. The two articles in Part 1 survey Richardson's work and provide a bibliography of his publications. The ten in Part 2 were to discuss the relationship of artifacts (archaeologically recovered data) to New Testament texts. In fact the first nine make almost no use of realia but concentrate on extrabiblical textual material, while the tenth, by James G. Dunn, concludes that archaeological evidence contributes little to an understanding of Romans, Sardis and Melito, Colossians, or Sepphoris; much more promising is the evidence for Jewish ossuaries, mikwaot (ritual baths), and synagogues in Palestine.

It is different in the last three sections. Four of the six essays in Part 3 use artifactual evidence in interpreting resurrection (Beth Shearim), early Christian codices, and architecture, in the "World of Christian Origins," i.e., the first Christian century. The nine essays in Part 4 are devoted to Late-Antique Judaism. Some make excellent use of archaeological data: epigraphic evidence for Jewish defectors, the Tobiad palace at 'Iraq al Amir, ossuaries as evidence for Jewish proselytes, Masada, the social context of the Mishnah, and so on. The three in Part 5 relate to the Greco-Roman world: one on theurgy, two on Apuleius in relation to realia, and an Ostian Mithraeum.

These studies illustrate the fact that archaeological finds can aid in the interpretation of texts. They are less conclusive about texts illuminating archaeological data. In both cases it is clear that both are open to various interpretations, which may clarify why some articles in this valuable collection make almost no use of archaeological data.