This book grapples with the question of how we can understand a text produced in an ancient social world which was, in all probability, quite different from our own. In order to answer this question it draws on resources from the social sciences and therefore may appropriately be called a work of social-scientific interpretation. In New Testament studies, the field of social-scientific interpretation is no longer in its infancy. Part of the broader purpose of this book, a generation on, is to take stock. It advocates a more integrated approach to conceiving the social worlds which we construct in order to assist us in the interpretative process. In doing so it draws attention to the liminal interface between values and practices, which I believe has been obscured in much of our application of social-scientific resources, which has tended to privilege either values or practices, social structures or social agency. The book's main thesis is that forms of piety which are frequently evident at this liminal interface and which were indigenous to first-century Judaea are particularly pertinent for our understanding of both the New Testament's ‘poor’ and the Johannine tradition, and that further they help account for the literature's distinctiveness, vis-à-vis the Synoptic tradition, in a more credible manner than the sectarian readings which currently dominate social approaches to the literature.

The problem of incommensurability

New Testament texts, like all texts, presuppose and encode information regarding the social world in which they were produced.