The Context Group

Biblical scholars

The Context Group is a working group of international biblical scholars who promote research into the Bible using social scientific methods such as anthropology and sociology.

The Context Group is an international team of scholars that merges historical exegesis and the social sciences to interpret the Bible in its social and cultural contexts. It initially organized in 1986 as the "Social Facets Seminar," headed by John H. Elliott as chair, meeting in conjunction with the Jesus Seminar under the direction of Robert W. Funk and the Westar Institute. In 1989 it broke ties with the Jesus Seminar and reorganized in Portland, Oregon, as The Context Group, A Project on the Bible in its Social and Cultural Environment. Two seminal publications by founding members were Bruce J. Malina's The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology (1981) and John H. Elliott's Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter (1981). Elliott's What is Social Scientific Criticism of the Bible? (1993) coined a new term for the group's methodology and provided a bibliographic survey. Other key figures who published on the subject during this era (all of whom eventually became part of the Context Group) include Dennis Duling, Philip Esler, Douglas E. Oakman, Jerome Neyrey SJ, John J. Pilch, Richard L. Rohrbaugh, and Wolfgang Stegemann. The work of the group has had considerable influence in the field, but also has attracted a variety of criticisms.

At the root of the Context Group's social scientific method is the belief that biblical scholars have taken western cultural assumptions for granted when interpreting biblical texts, which are ancient documents produced in a much different culture. The key difference is that the modern western world is an individualistic, industrial society, whereas the society of the ancient Mediterranean world was collectivistic and agrarian. The ancient Mediterranean was also a high context society, where discourse took shared cultural values for granted. This contrasts with the modern western world, which is a low context society in which discourse tends to be more specific and specialized (i. e. to particular groups, subcultures, etc.). According to the Context scholars, the interpreter must learn the cultural assumptions and values behind the text in order to understand it correctly. This involves understanding values such as honor and shame, for example, which Malina calls "pivotal cultural values." Other common themes in Context analysis of the Bible include patron client relationships, the "evil eye", kinship, purity codes, and dyadic/group oriented personalities.