Many who read the Bible, use the New Testament to define contemporary behavior. However, one can not truly understand the New Testament without first understanding what life in first century Palestine. The author taps on a number of scholarly sources to address money, life in the home, meals, bathing and health, its honor-shame society, religion, war and death. Although this book is scholarly, it is readable and should be a companion piece to any serious study of the New Testament. ( )

Fairly interesting (and sometimes disturbing) about every day life in Israel around the time of Jesus' life. Though it claims not to be about Jesus, it references the gospel stories (Gnostic and traditional) often to cite examples of archaeological and historical findings. ( )

This was an interesting journey into first-century Palestine, but it wasn't as good as I thought it would be. For someone who keeps insisting the book isn't about Jesus, the author sure talks about Jesus a lot. His numerous footnotes (on practically every page, sometimes more than one) range between fascinating to annoying, and I think the epilogue, about his own 21st-century trip to Bethlehem, was kind of out-of-place. But I did learn a lot, and I liked Korb's translations of King James Bible verses into plain English. ( )

Entertaining more than a deep history. Some background on what was going on at that time. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I first became a fan of Scott Korb because of his remarkable 2008 book The Faith Between Us, co-authored with Peter Bebergal, in which through a series of essays disguised as letters the two not only compare and contrast their differing religious beliefs (Catholicism and Judaism), but also what it's like to be intensely religious in the first place within their circles of mostly atheistic, arts-friendly intellectuals; and now Korb has another nonfiction book out, the much more straightforward Life in Year One, which presents in a series of systematic chapters exactly what the latest theories are regarding what actual day-to-day life was like for the people of the Middle East during the years that Jesus was literally alive (and by extension the entire first century of the Christian Era). As such, then, Korb inventively combines anthropology, sociology, history, literature and theology to present as all-encompassing a look at the first century AD as possible, offering up mostly things you would guess about these times anyway (essentially, that life was generally much shorter and more brutish than now), but also uncovering all kinds of interesting facts that will come as a surprise to most (such as just how many different sects of Judaism actually existed between 1 and 100 AD, Christians being merely one of them, and how little these groups generally got along with each other), and with Korb wisely avoiding the "bloated NPR-bait" trap of so many of these books by turning in a tight, always interesting 200-page manuscript for his own. A brisk and fascinating read, you certainly do not need to be religious yourself to get a lot of enjoyment out of Life in Year One, and it comes recommended to all who like their airport and beach titles to be more studious than trashy in nature.

Out of 10: 9.0 ( )