Last weekend, I participated in the Annual Society of Biblical Literature Congress held at San Diego: a short paper on the appropriateness of models in descriptions of first-century Roman Palestine. In this case, it was about the “Image of Limited Good” model adopted by members of the Jesus Context Group. This model comes from the research done on a traditional peasant society (Tzintzuntzan) in the forties, fifties and sixties by George Foster, a sociologist from UC Berkeley.

But it is not the use of models in ancient history or of deductive vs inductive methods that was of the greatest interest to me. What was once more most puzzling and disturbing was that I was at the center of one of the great cities in the US to talk about the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, which on the whole are about social justice. Here we were, about ten thousand scholars, scholars-to-be, book people and so forth, filling up the big hotels of the area and the Convention Center. It was the usual well-organized madness. However consuming the madness, however, it couldn’t make one forget the reality of roads, banking webs anchored in the sky-scrapers around us, electronic networks, the assymetry of labor relations (there was a partial, discrete, strike against the Hilton chain going on), the not-so-hidden beggary, and especially the military ships across the bay and the large bases not so distant from the city.

Talking about ancient empires, labor relationships of the past, or degrees of acculturation (“hellenization”), was strange. And modelling certainly didn’t work. As post-moderns are finally beginning to realize, any and all critical theorizing, or tooling of intellectual and social realities, can be worked back into the machinery one thinks one is criticizing. What is left, ποίησις?