Holly Beers. A Week in the Life of a Greco-Roman Woman

Holly Beers’s A Week in the Life of a Greco-Roman Woman is a recent addition to the rapidly expanding A Week in the Life series. The aim of the series is to give insight into the social and cultural background of the NT through the genre of historical fiction. The concept is educationally sound; rather than learning by trawling through informational content arranged by headings, the reader is instead drawn into the first century Greco-Roman world through the imagination, experiencing the sights, smells, and noisy bustle of life in that world.A Week in the Life of a Greco-Roman Woman recounts seven days in the life of the fictional Anthia, a young, heavily pregnant fisherman’s wife living in Ephesus at the time of Paul’s ministry there (Acts 18–20). Having lost a friend during childbirth in the opening pages, Anthia grows increasingly anxious for the health of her own baby as the week progresses. As Anthia faces worrying bleeding and decreasing movements from her unborn child, she happens across characters from the movement known as “the Way” and the Jewish Paul who leads them. This group is radically countercultural; its members come from diverse social strata and yet treat each other as equals. The high-status Claudia, for example, introduces her slaves to Anthia by name and invites Anthia to eat with her. The reader follows Anthia as she is drawn further and further into this group, eventually finding herself at one of their weekly gatherings and being prayed for by the women in the group. The need for healing and a safe childbirth raises questions for Anthia about her loyalty to Artemis, the goddess to which she would usually turn for prayers for healing. Should she pray to Artemis or Jesus? The decision is complicated by the necessity to conform to her husband’s expectations and show him the required honor. At one point, Philetus discovers his wife talking with people from the “Jesus association.” He drags her from their presence by her hair and commands, “Never again will you shame our family, our association, or our protector Artemis” (p. 163).At times, the plot intersects with and conflates elements of the storyline of Acts: Anthia and her husband overhear Paul speaking in the lecture hall of Tyrannus; a neighbor’s child is healed by a handkerchief that Paul had touched; some members of the Way burn their sorcery scrolls, an act which Anthia fearfully understands as a public shaming of the gods. Priscilla is a prominent character in the latter half of the story; Timothy, Sosthenes, Dorcas, and several other familiar characters make cameo appearances.Alongside the plot is the narration of daily life for a woman in the Greco-Roman world. Anthia is often preoccupied with where the next day’s meal might come from and whether it will be sufficient for all the family members living in the one room urban insula with her. She makes frequent visits to public latrines (in fact, there seems to be an obsession with chamber pots and public latrines) and visits one of the town’s Roman baths. She works in a small vendor space in the agora selling her husband’s catch of fish.A strength of the story is the nuancing of daily life among the women characters. Rather than presenting the lives of Greco-Roman women in monochrome, Beers shows that differing status levels result in very different lives. In contrast with Anthia, Claudia lives in a multiple roomed terrace house, has an abundance of fresh fruit to offer her guests, and owns slaves who do all the domestic chores.Helpful sideboxes throughout the pages of the story give timely background information about the cultural norms and realities of the Greco-Roman world. Topics covered include the practice of infanticide and the dangers of childbirth, societal expectations within marriages, the scale of poverty, urban housing and sanitation, the practice of medicine and physicians, voluntary associations, perfumery and cosmetics, slavery, patronage, and the role of Artemis the patron goddess of Ephesus.While the biblical scholarship is sound, the book lacks the subtlety of a well-written novel. There is minimal character development, and the plot is slow moving with little complexity. There is a heavy reliance on the thoughts of the main character to explain cultural concepts of honor/shame and patronage, rather than a subtle weaving of this information into dialogue or action. More “show” and less “tell” is required. When dialogue is used to illuminate cultural realities, it is sometimes stilted and unnatural. For example, Paul, when inviting one of his customers to eat with him, overrides his customer’s objections by saying “Jesus, whom we worship and honor, shared meals with people from varying status levels, and we do the same” (p. 35). While this dialogue helpfully reflects what is known about the social world of Paul, one wonders if the folk of the first century would have used such formal sociological terms.Despite these shortcomings, Beers’s book is highly recommended. It helps the reader to breathe in the cultural milieu of the Greco-Roman world in a way that illuminates many of the NT letters and the Book of Acts. Designed to be accessible for the general reader, the book could also find a place in an undergraduate NT unit as supplemental material or for an assessment piece

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