ABSTRACT
It is curious, to say the least, that many Americans read the Bible and claim to understand what its authors mean. For early Christian authors and their audiences were radically different from contemporary US Bible readers in the way they thought of persons. Americans inevitably consider persons individualistically, as psychologically unique beings. This feature is apparent from our television programming from the nightly news through soaps to talk shows. If these shows are any indication, they demonstrate that Americans are totally bent on understanding the self, on solving individual problems individualistically, on realizing individual potential. The stories we share and which rivet our attention invariably point to the individual self pursuing its self-fulfillment in an unfriendly, often hostile social world (Berman 1987:100-102). When Americans take up their Bible, they inevitably bring the same set of expectations to their scriptural reading as they bring to their TV viewing. In both persons are always understood individualistically and psychologically. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest an alternative scenario for imagining the Mediterranean persons who appear on the pages of the Bible, specifically on the pages of the gospels and letters. In this alternative scenario, persons are not considered individualistically; in fact, first-century Mediterranean persons never thought psychologically in the way we do. Even speaking of those human beings as “persons” is somewhat of an anachronism since there is no word for “person” in Hebrew, Greek or Latin. Hence when I use the word “person” of biblical personages and their contemporaries, I mean only “individual human being.”
