Abstract
This Readers Guide introduces biblical interpreters to the use of spatial theory as it is applied to biblical texts. Modern geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists understand space to consist of the physical world in which people exist, the ideological underpinnings of understanding places as designated for certain activities while restricting other activities, and the lived practices of people within those places that sometimes challenge and sometimes reaffirm the expected uses of such places. Biblical scholars have only recently begun to consider how space fits into an analysis of the texts with which they are interested. These scholars use spatial theory to analyze the spaces of the Roman Empire and how Jesus and his early followers fit within those spaces, in some cases contesting dominant meanings and practices, while in other cases adopting the dominant spatial practices of their cultural contexts.
The significance of space to understanding human activity cannot be overstated. Everything that exists exists within space, though this truism had been largely neglected in social theory. This statement applies as much to social movements as it does to inanimate objects. “Social reality is not just co-incidentally spatial, existing ‘in’ space, it is presuppositionally and ontologically spatial. There is no unspatialized social reality” (Soja 1999: 46; emphasis original). Human existence is bodily, and human interaction involves interactions between physical beings in space. Despite such self-evident truisms, for much of the twentieth century, studies of social phenomena neglected the aspect of space (Pred 1990). The past four decades have begun to make up for this neglect. Studies on space and spatiality have appeared in great numbers (among the most significant of these studies are Lefebvre 1991 [French original 1974]; Tuan 1977; Sack 1986; Soja 1989, 1996; Harvey). These studies have made a profound impact on some biblical scholars, and the scholarship on biblical space/spatiality is growing at a relatively fast rate in recent years (Berquist & Camp 2007, 2008; Gunn & McNutt; Malbon; Matthews; Moxnes 2003, 2010; Neyrey 1994, 2003, 2004; Økland; Scott; Sleeman; Stewart 2007, 2009). This Readers Guide will briefly examine some of the more recent theoretical approaches to space and spatiality, highlight two examples of the descriptions of space from ancient geographers and historians, and describe some recent studies of space focused on biblical texts.
Space and Social Identity—Three Approaches
Environmental determinism is the idea that the geographical setting of a particular people determines both the social and biological characteristics of the people. Environmental determinism “was dominant in American geography through the first two decades of the twentieth century (Pitzl: 68). This approach was also the dominant one among ancient geographers. In the ancient world, people, like Jesus of Nazareth or Ruth the Moabite, were known by the places from which they came. The author of Acts even provides a birthplace for Paul (Acts 9:11) which is “not an insignificant city” (Acts 21:39). Malina and Neyrey (113–24) have shown that the “geography” of a person, where the person is born or resides, is a key marker of identity in Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean contexts. People often stereotyped other people according to the places from which they came (e.g., Titus 1:12; John 1:46). This stereotyping was due to the fact that the personalities of people were considered largely fixed by their place of birth or place of residence (Stewart 2009: 95–103). Menander gives instructions about how to praise people with respect to the place of their origin (Or. 2.369.18–370.3).
Many ancient geographers believed that the earth was structured by “climate zones” (Greek: klimata) that made certain areas fit for civilization and others unfit. These climate zones, ranging in number from three to seven, were identified by their latitude. The atmospheric conditions of the climate zones determined the personalities and capabilities of their residents. According to the Greeks and Romans, the areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea fit into the middle climate zone, the one most hospitable for habitation (Stewart 2009: 96–101). According to Ptolemy, the residents of the areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea were “medium in colouring, of moderate stature, in nature equable … civilized in their habits” (Tetrabiblos 2.2.57), while those living under the oppressive sun in the southern climate zone were burned (and thus had darker complexions) and those in the northern climate zone, due to a lack of sun, had lighter complexions. Both groups are called “savage” by Ptolemy, while the latter are “odd” (Tetrabiblos 2.2.56). The book of Jubilees uses the climatic zones to describe the areas parceled out to the three sons of Noah after the flood. Ham gets the southern, hot zone, while Japheth gets the northern, cold zone. Shem gets the “just right” zone in the middle containing Mt. Sinai, Mt. Zion and the Garden of Eden (VanderKam 1994; Scott: 27–35).
These designations are social distinctions from a Greek/Roman point of view. “Savagery” and “oddity” refer to the fact that these areas did not practice the same customs as did the Greeks or Romans. For the Greeks and Romans, culture emanated outward from the most hospitable central climate zone. The further one was removed from this “perfect” middle, the more likely one was to be “uncivilized.” Space does have a role in shaping identity, but environmental determinism clearly overstates the determinative impact that space plays in the formation of social identity.
Environmental determinism as a theoretical approach to geography persisted into the twentieth century. Modern geographers and anthropologists, though, reject this approach largely due to its racist and sexist underpinnings (Soja 1989: 31–35). A second approach to understanding space grew out of a growing interest in human agency within the social sciences. The rejection of environmental determinism led to an understanding of space that conceived of space as an abstract nothingness, neutral, separate from human social and power relations. To be sure, humans have left their imprint on space, but the “new geographers” assumed that place has not had a corresponding effect on people (Soja 1986: 34–35; Tilley: 9–11). “Space was quite literally a nothingness, a simple surface for action, lacking depth. This space was universal, everywhere and anywhere the same … external to and indifferent from human affairs. The neutrality of this space resulted in its being divorced from any consideration of structures of power and domination” (Tilley: 9). Though this approach had the positive effect of challenging the racist and sexist assumptions often explicit or implicit in environmental determinism, the shift toward human agency relegated the study and significance of space to a subordinate position: “Critical social theory tended to project human geography on to the physical background of society, thus allowing its powerful structuring effect to be thrown away with the dirty bathwater of a rejected environmental determinism” (Soja 1989: 35; see Livingstone: 200–04). The move away from environmental determinism and to human agency rendered space a “neutral backdrop.” If environmental determinism falls entirely on the nature side of the nature/culture divide, this second understanding of space falls entirely on the culture side. Humans create and manipulate space but space has no impact upon human behavior or culture. Lost in such an understanding of space is any sense of how space encodes and replicates social and power relations within a society. Lefebvre (94) called inattention to these structures of power and domination the “initial error” in thinking about space.
A third theoretical approach to space understands space to be “socially produced.” Socially produced space is related to what others have labeled the “built environment” (Lawrence & Low). Sack calls this process territoriality and defines it as a “spatial strategy to affect, influence, or control resources and people, by controlling an area” (Sack 1986: 1). Sack suggests that territoriality has three steps: classification, communication, and control. Space is delimited, set aside for specific uses in ways that frequently exclude other uses. Those limitations are communicated (by formal means, such as signs, fences, or security patrols, or by more informal means including conformity to prevailing social customs) and enforced through a variety of means, even including, for example, imprisonment for “trespassing.” In this way spaces are socially produced. Human action in space both produces and limits opportunities for certain kinds of activities with spaces.
Among the most important theorists of the “social production” of space are Lefebvre, Harvey, and Soja (1989, 1996). Social production produces social space, which acts as both opportunity and restraint. “Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others” (Lefebvre: 73). Lefebvre (38–39) suggested that social space should be considered from three different vantage points—spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space) and spaces of representation (lived space). Soja uses the terms “Firstspace,” “Secondspace,” and “Thirdspace” to refer to these same ideas (1996). Firstspace, in Soja's understanding “is focused on the ‘real’ material world,” while Secondspace “interprets this reality through ‘imagined’ representations of spatiality” (1996: 6). Firstspace, then, is the concrete, measurable space. As spatial practice, however, such space produces “a spatiality that ‘embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation’” (1996: 66). At the same time, however, such spatial practice secretes “a society's space; it propounds and presupposes it … it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it” (1996: 66). Spatial practice, or Firstspace, then, is that element of the spatial triad that reproduces the “normal” means a society has for appropriating space. In this sense, the repetition of the spatial practice dominates Firstspace, limiting or preventing other types of spatial practice in the same space. “Firstspace epistemologies” are found
in the concrete and mappable geographies of our lifeworlds, ranging from the emotional and behavioral space ‘bubbles’ which invisibly surround our bodies to the complex spatial organization of social practices that shape our ‘action spaces’ in households, buildings, neighborhoods, villages, cities, regions, nations, state, the world economy, and global geopolitics [Soja 1996: 74–75].
Space replicates power in societies. Like everything else, power exists within space (Soja 1996: 31–32). Often groups who produce space attempt to “hide” the power relations inherent within the way that the space is defined by arguing that the behaviors expected or required within certain spaces are “natural.” In so doing, spaces “can be used to displace personal relationships, between controlled and controller, by relationships between people and the ‘law of the place’—territory is thereby reified in order to promote personal ambitions personally” (Johnston: 189; see also Sack 1986: 32–34). In this way, spaces themselves seem to be the agents doing the controlling. To suggest that certain practices are “the way things are done here” is to deflect attention from the fact that people fix, communicate and enforce these spatial practices.
Secondspace refers to abstract meanings of space, and approaching space in this way leads to an understanding “that spatial knowledge is primarily produced through discursively devised representations of space, through the spatial workings of the mind” (Soja 1996: 79). Secondspace “is also tied to the relations of production and, especially, to the order or design that they impose. Such order is constituted via control over knowledge, signs, and codes” (1996: 67).
Because space replicates power relations within society, spaces are both constantly negotiated and changeable. On the one hand, spaces are never the same twice because the social relationships that give meaning to space constantly change. Tilley says “places can never be exactly the same places twice, although there may be ideological attempts to provide ‘stability’ or perceptual or cognitive fixity to a place, to reproduce a set of dominant meanings, understandings, representations and images” (Tilley: 27–28). These attempts to attain fixity, a powerful element of Secondspace efforts, lead to the development of “place myths” (Shields). These place myths, however, may be viewed differently between residents of certain places (Sack 1992: 11–12). Place myths are, in Tilley's terms, the ideological attempts to provide stability for places. These attempts are always open to negotiation and contestation, and such negotiations often manifest themselves in two ways: competing place myths and violations of places. The recent “Occupy” protests in the United States and elsewhere around the world highlight the contestation of space. On the one hand, Wall Street is viewed as the location of job and wealth “creators,” while on the other hand, to the protestors, Wall Street is a space (and by extension a spatial practice) that is exploitative of the vast majority of the world's population.
Violations of the spatial practices of Firstspace or the ideologies of Secondspace can happen in any number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious way is invasion, either through war or other violent means. More subtle violations of places can happen through any number of challenges to the dominant myths of place. The Civil Rights movement in America involved such violations in iconic incidents such as Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat at the front of the bus or the sit-ins by African Americans at lunch counters throughout the American South. Ultimately, of course, such violations may be met with violence, as participants in the Civil Rights movements themselves experienced.
These violations of order occur largely in what Soja calls Thirdspace. These spaces of representation are those spaces which are “the dominated—and hence passively experienced space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (Lefebvre: 39). These spaces are those which are directly lived, but also the spaces in which challenges to the spatial practice and representations of space of the dominant society might be re-imagined or contested (Harvey: 218–19). Soja refers to these spaces of representation as “lived space as a strategic location from which to encompass, understand, and potentially transform all spaces simultaneously” (1996: 68; emphasis original). These spaces are found at the periphery, on the margin, and are “the chosen spaces for struggle, liberation, emancipation” (68). Third-space is the place where, for Soja, the concrete materiality of Firstspace and the imaginary space of Secondspace come together in a real and imagined space that is lived space. Such lived space, dominated as it is, frequently does not challenge the spatial practice of Firstspace or the imaginings of Secondspace. Building on the work of Michel Foucault, Soja argues, however, that although the power of those in positions of authority produce and reproduce “difference as a key strategy to create and maintain modes of social and spatial division that are advantageous to its continued empowerment and authority,” Thirdspace also represents a space for resistance to such efforts (1996: 87). These spaces, for Soja, “are thus the terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces,’ spaces of resistance to the dominant order arising precisely from their subordinate, peripheral or marginalized positioning” (1996: 68).
By now it is common for spatial theorists to recognize that space is produced and controlled by social groups. Space exists in a material sense, it is conceived and given meaning in thought, through signs and other symbols, and space is lived in by people for whom the materiality and conceptions of space are both opportunity and limit. Greeks, Romans, and Israelites had particular ways of conceiving the spaces which they inhabited, and these conceptions were challenged often by the lived experiences of the various peoples of Southwest Asia, Northern Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean basin.
Space in Texts
Spaces described in texts are slightly different from other spaces. Though they may describe more or less accurately particular spatial practices or representations of space, since places can never be the same twice, they always encode a specific meaning to a place that, while negotiable outside the world of the text is, within the text, fixed. If those whose interests are served by contemporaneous spatial practices attempt to achieve relative fixity, this fixity is achieved actually in the writing of texts. Maps, for instance, most often function in such a way to protect and preserve the spatial interests of those involved in their making (Harley). Authors of texts, as members of societies in which spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces are in constant negotiation, describe the spaces of their own imaginations. These spaces may be very similar to the spaces of their societies, or they may offer a significant challenge to such spaces. In either case, spaces represented in texts are spaces of the imagination, spaces of the artist (Stewart 2007: 58–61; Leyerle; Smith 1978: 74–95). To some extent, authors have control over the space that they create.
Claudia Camp has challenged, however, an easy association of space in texts with Secondspace. She acknowledges that “at first glance … any written text could be so simply classified as Secondspace…This would be particularly true of canonical literature, given its apparent status as the record of the winners” (Camp: 66). She argues, however, that “Narrative literature potentially supplies both a model for thinking Thirdspatially and a site of Thirdspace from which live First- and Secondspatial possibilities can be abstracted and analyzed” (68). Narrative texts can produce multiple understandings of any given space, endorsing First-and Secondspatial understandings of those spaces, while at the same time challenging important elements of their perceptions and conceptions. Camp importantly points to the critique of Thirdspace mentioned above. Thirdspace as lived space has the potential for emancipatory practice, but “oppressors also have lived spaces” (68). In this way, Third-space also contains a “power-mongering” element (68). Camp uses this Thirdspatial understanding to discuss the work of Ben Sira. This text “creates space; specifically, Bible-texts create the space of the Jerusalem Temple as and at the center of the author's lived world, a Temple that the author also encountered in its Firstspatial concreteness” (69).
Texts, then, can describe Firstspace, Secondspace, or Thirdspace, but texts are not themselves spaces in which people live. Considered in this way, texts themselves cannot be material space but only ideological (representations of) space. When considered from the perspectives of Soja's First-, Second-, and Thirdspatial epistemologies, however, Camp is surely correct to note that texts can take an approach to space that employ any of these epistemologies. In this way, texts can challenge the spatial practice of First-space, the ideological projections of Secondspace, and the lived spaces of Thirdspace (Matthews; Sleeman: 42–51).
Two examples from ancient geography
Oikoumenē
Greeks and Romans (and by extension early Jews and early Christians) understood human beings to occupy most of the world (Stewart 2009: 69–80). The “oikoumenē” is, literally, the inhabited world. It is that part of the known land mass that humans inhabited in the ancient world. The oikoumenē is distinguished from that bit of land surrounding its edges which is not subdued by human activity. By the time of Strabo (63
By the Greek period, the earth was routinely divided into three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa (always referred to as Libya in Greek sources). These three continents made up the oikoumenē and were considered the entirety of the habitable world. The oikoumenē is defined, according to the Greeks and Romans, by the spatial practices of “civilization.” Those who live within the Roman orbit “wear the toga,” and when Romans conquered new areas, the conquered people demonstrated their newly found “civility” by wearing the toga (i.e. Strabo, Geography 3.2.15). The most ambitious of the Roman apologists argued that Rome enforced its cultural conventions (i.e. “civilization”) across the entire oikoumenē (e.g., Aelius Aristides 26.102–103). For Aristides, the Romans had united the whole earth and, because of the Romans, a universal order had been granted to the oikoumenē.
There were various ways of challenging the significance of the oikoumenē. Among the most notable is found in the “dream of Scipio” in book 10 of Cicero's De Re Publica. Here the younger Scipio is made aware of the limited amount of space that the Romans actually occupy, and he comes to see that there is more than one oikoumenai (Cicero, Re Pub. 6.19–23). The lesson learned is that fame and honor on the earth is nothing compared to reputation in the celestial realm. The oikoumenē of the Romans, then, is limited and ultimately insignificant when compared with the expanse of the cosmos. It is only in achieving removal from the earth that true blessedness arrives (Re Pub. 6.26.29).
From the perspective of Soja's theory, the Firstspace of the Roman Empire is the totality of the land (and sea) controlled by the Romans. The description of the Empire as the space of “civilization” is a Secondspatial ideology. There was clearly massive variety among the ways in which people lived within the Empire. Not all those within the Roman oikoumenē wore togas, and not all of those within the Hellenistic Empire of Alexander and his successors spoke Greek. These spatial practices, however, granted access to much of the power in these Empires. Within the oikoumenē there were numerous lived spaces of resistance.
Perhaps the most interesting form of Thirdspaces described in the literature is the edges of the earth. At the edges of the inhabited world, there were numerous marvels to see. Outside of the oikoumenē, the normal conventions of society do not apply. The edges of the oikoumenē represent the fantastic, the grotesque (see Romm and Evans). The marvels to be seen at the edges of the inhabited world might include people who had heads like dogs (i.e. Herodotus, Hist. 4.191), but they might also include serious breaches of human etiquette like cannibalism (e.g., Herodotus, Hist. 4.18).
Even within the inhabited spaces of the oikoumenē, there were some areas that did not sustain the normal life of civilizations. Communities themselves recognized the boundaries of their territories, and within those boundaries, the normal patterns of a society were expected. Matthews suggests that the regular references in the Hebrew Bible to the area “‘from Dan to Beersheba’ (Judg 20:1; 1 Sam 3:20; 17:11, 1 Kgs 4:25) indicate an attempt to define the limitations of the social ties and obligations for the covenant community” (14–15). Outside the land, Israelites encountered people who were not Israelites, and the expectations for the treatment of non-Israelites (particularly outside the land of Israel) were far different from those required when dealing with people within the land.
The wilderness in the biblical tradition is notable for several reasons. The wilderness is often viewed negatively. When the Israelites leave Egypt after having fled the Pharaoh and his army, they complain to Moses, asking why he has led them from the “safety” of Egyptian slavery into the wilderness to die (Exod 14:11–12). A lack of food is a key feature of areas designated as “wilderness” in the Bible. The opposite of wilderness is a cultivated area. The wilderness is an area that has not been cultivated and is, therefore, not under human control. The desert is also a place where demons dwell (Isa 34:9–15; Smith 1978).
Though the wilderness is often a place where danger lurks, it can also be a place in which people can hide when they are sought by others (i.e. 1 Sam 19:8–24:1; VanderKam 1999). Perhaps the clearest example of this understanding of the wilderness is found in 1 Maccabees 2, where the friends of Mattathias hide in the wilderness in order to avoid the Seleucid armies. Though some of these people die on the Sabbath because they are both unwilling to fight and unwilling to cover their hiding places with stones, many survive in the wilderness, hiding themselves together with their families and livestock (1 Macc 2:28–38). It also serves as a space in which the deity is encountered (Exod 3; 19; Isa 40:3; VanderKam 1999: 160–64; Stewart 2009: 142–54).
These Thirdspaces pose potential challenges to those who attempt to control the Firstspaces and Secondspaces of empire. Within Thirdspace the lived experience of the people can create new spatial practices and new ideologies of space. Stewart argues that the reason for the giving of the Torah in the wilderness is the possibility of establishing a new spatial practice outside the normal spatial practices of “civilized” territories (Stewart 2009: 142–54). Those who lived in the Thirdspaces, controlled by those at the center but offering the opportunity for different spatial practices, were frequently called lawless and dangerous by those who accepted the dominant spatial practices (i.e. Strabo, Geogr. 3.3.5; Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places 24.43). These spaces, however, could also serve as a place of heightened observance of the spatial practices of the centers of civilization. The Qumran community and the ascetics of the Egyptian desert are clear examples of a more stringent observance of the spatial practices of civilization.
Public space/private space
The Greeks and Romans distinguished between public and private spaces (Neyrey 2003). According to the Greek ideal, men undertook the business of the polis in public spaces. Space was gender divided in this ideal (Aristotle, Oec. 1.34.1343b30 — 1344a9; Xenophon, Oec. 7.19–22; Philo, Spec. Leg. 3.169; Neyrey 1994; Osiek & Balch; 40–41). Men worked outdoors and represented the family in public affairs, while women remained in the home and tended to the internal affairs of the household (i.e. Sir 42:9–14; Balch & Osiek: 43–45). Greek houses, according to Vitruvius, were designed to separate men's space from women's space (Arch. 7.4.5). Even within the household, then, some spaces were for males and some were for females. While the household was private space in Greek cultures, most of the household was public space in the Roman world (Vitruvius, Arch. 6.5.1–2). Riggsby argues that private matters, those not related to the public welfare, were relegated to the “cubiculum,” a room usually dedicated to sleeping, sex, and other private matters in the Roman household. Romans had different standards for “public” behavior for women (i.e. Cornelius Nepos, Prae. 4–7).
Feminist biblical scholarship (see Osiek, MacDonald with Tulloch) raises significant questions about whether such distinctions about public and private describe the lived experience of most women in these cultures. Houses with a single room could not accommodate separate living quarter for men and women (Meyers: 22–32). At certain peak times of the agricultural season, such as harvesting, many women would live in the fields alongside the men of the household because of the amount of labor needed for certain tasks. Women (Ruth 2:8–23) might be forced into the fields to glean in order to survive. Women were not excluded from public spaces altogether, even in the places where the Greek ideal was in full force. This ideal is a Secondspace ideology about space rather than indicative of a Firstspace spatial practice. Lived space challenged the Secondspace ideology of a gender divided world (Økland: 39–77). Current conversations about women's roles within churches arise because the authors of certain biblical texts “fixed” the distinction between public and private space and their works become canonized. Such Secondspace idealizations differed from lived space in antiquity, although they likely significantly influenced the Firstspace spatial practices of a patriarchal society (Økland: 224–51).
Recent Works Focusing on Space/spatiality in the New Testament
The studies discussed below represent some variety, in terms of both textual focus and methodology, of recent contributions to the study of New Testament space/spatiality. Many other significant contributions to the topic have been made (i.e. Davies; Malbon; Smith 1992; VanderKam 1994; Flanagan; Freyne; Gunn & McNutt; Matthews; Berquist & Camp 2007, 2008; Moxnes 2010). Readers are encouraged to look at the many works listed in the bibliography for further information.
In a series of articles and a monograph on the topic of place, Galilee and the historical Jesus (2000; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2003; 2010), Moxnes has called attention to the ways in which the social, geographical and cultural contexts of scholars plays a role in shaping their discourse about Galilee. Thus, the question of whether Galilee should be seen as “Jewish” or “Gentile” is embedded in larger social, cultural, and political circumstances of biblical interpreters. In his monograph, Putting Jesus in His Place, Moxnes argued that Jesus' movement challenged traditional associations of space with alternative understandings of important places, such as the household.
Households are “place” in two senses. On the one hand, they are physical places in which people live. On the other hand, households are a set of relationships into which people are placed (2003: 28–45). Jesus, according to the Gospel accounts, left the place of his household when he went to join John's baptism movement. Indeed, each of “the transitions in Jesus' vocation is described as movement in place” (2003: 47). Jesus' saying comparing the son of man, who has no place to rest his head, to foxes and birds, who do have such places (Q 9:58), means that the son of man “is simply dislocated from civilized society, with its characteristics of permanent human dwellings” (2003: 50). Further, Jesus' saying regarding the prophet's lack of honor is his hometown (Mark 6:4) showed that Jesus “had rejected the order and structure” of Nazareth (2003: 53). Instead of accepting the traditional patriarchal structure of household and village life, Jesus and his followers operate within what Moxnes terms “queer space.” Jesus called his followers to leave the “male space” of the household with its patriarchal structure and enter into the space of the kingdom. “The household was a place where everyone knew his or her place and had a sense of limits and boundaries. And the household structure and sense of meaning replicated that of the larger community, from the local village to the people or nation” (2003: 104). Jesus, however, rejected the structure of such places.
The kingdom was not a mirror image of the patriarchal household, it transgressed its boundaries, it had a different composition, and it lacked its hierarchy…Jesus was an ascetic who transgressed the boundaries of what it meant to be male in first-century Palestine. Moreover, he introduced that transgression as characteristic of the kingdom [2003: 105].
In Moxnes's view, Jesus challenged the material spatial practices and the ideologies that supported them (Firstspace and Secondspace in Soja's terms) by introducing a new “imagined place that relates to and challenges the spatial structure of these other places by establishing an alternative structure” (2003: 157). Jesus' alternative structure involves wholesale revision of the places of household and kingdom, as they are replaced by a space in which “these two spatial structures, the household and the kingdom, meet in the image of the household of God” (2003: 157).
Økland suggests that Paul's concern in 1 Corinthians 11–14 is the establishment of sanctuary space, distinct from the space of the household. Part of the difficulty that Paul has in establishing such space is that the meeting place of the ekklesia was almost certainly the household of members of the group. Paul is at pains, then, to suggest that, as ritual space, the ekklesia meeting involves a different order than that of the ordinary household. Økland argues that the reason for Paul's articulation of a different pattern of rules for eating meals within the ekklesia is to distinguish these meals from the normal spatial practice within the household. Paul's injunction for people to eat in order to satiate hunger at home instead of in the ekklesia is problematic for those for whom the meeting space of the ekklesia is home (1 Cor 11:34; Økland: 137–43).
Paul's creation of sanctuary space involves models adopted from discourses of which the Corinthians were likely already aware. These discourses involved an understanding of a macrocosmic order which was to be replicated in the microcosmic sanctuary space of the ekklesia. Økland asserts that Paul's model for understanding this microcosmic imitation of a macrocosmic order was based on the relationship of the temple in Jerusalem to the cosmic temple of which it was a model (152–67). Since the space of the ekklesia occupied space that was normally another kind of space (household space), the ekklesia space must be ritually constructed, bounded by regulations regarding time, people, clothing, and ritual action. “Within this space there is a particular pattern of action and a particular place for everything following a cosmic order—but all this has to be spelled out by Paul since there are no walls or other material texts indicating it” (151).
In spelling out these patterns of action, Paul participates in particular discourses regarding women. Women in these discourses are seen as a threat to a cosmic order that is structured around a phallagocentric norm. This norm, evidenced in 1 Corinthians by the ekklesia's identification as the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:12–27), is structured around the idea that the male element of the cosmos represents order while the female element represents threat (Økland: 78–130). Paul adopts this discourse when he suggests that women should be veiled. Such veiling represents a boundary marker between men and women. Other such boundary markers include the appropriate speech for each gender within ekklesia space (Økland: 168–223). The ritual construction of the ekklesia as sanctuary space means that, for Paul, it is the ekklesia, rather than the household or the city, which represents microcosmically the order of the macrocosmos.
In his ordering of the ritual gatherings chs. 11 — 14, Paul “maps'” the internal space of the ekklesia as a systemic hierarchy, defining where men are in relation to Christ and to women, where women are in relation to men and angels, where prophets are in relation to apostles, teachers and tongue speakers, and so on. The system is meaningful because it corresponds to a greater, cosmic order [Økland: 229].
This cosmic order is a Secondspace ideology, and Paul's sustained argument supporting it is indicative that the lived space of the Corinthian ekklesia diverged from Paul's ideological space.
Wenell argues that Jesus, a descendant of Abraham, would likely have been as concerned about the land promised to his ancestor as were his contemporary “Jews” (1–17). She notes that the space of the temple was contested, and that the practices associated with it were subject to varying interpretations. Jesus' actions in the temple symbolize a destruction of the temple, and taken together with the constitution of the Twelve, result in Jesus' rejecting spatialized purity boundaries and advocating “a new tribal arrangement which was open at its borders and promised places for those outside” (Wenell: 139). She suggests that Jesus envisioned a reorganized space, neither centered in the temple, nor revolving around the spatial practices of purity, but focused on the restoration of Israel.
Stewart (2009) argued that the Gospel of Mark contrasted the “spaces of civilization” with the spaces normally considered “uninhabited” in the landscape of Greeks, Romans, and Judeans and placed the spatial practice of the Jesus group within the “uninhabited” spaces, such as the mountain, the sea, and the desert. In contrast to the prevailing descriptions of the uninhabited spaces as sites of the grotesque or dangerous, Mark uses the sites as a place for the development and expansion of Jesus' movement, whereas Mark characterizes the spaces of civilization, the cities and villages of Galilee and Jerusalem as sites of opposition to Jesus. It is within these sites that Jesus (and sometimes his followers) finds himself under near constant surveillance, ultimately ending in the execution of Jesus. Mark uses the positive associations of wilderness spaces with sites of refuge and encounters with the divine to challenge the spatial practices and their ideological underpinnings found in Roman and Judean societies.
Sleeman proposes that a “narrative-geographical reading of Acts assumes and highlights a multiplicity of complex and contested spatialities within the narrative” (53; emphasis original). Rather than treating Jerusalem (or Rome) as the central place of Acts, Sleeman reads the ascension narrative as suggesting that Jesus' Firstspace absence, his removal from the material world, and from his disciples, creates a thirdspatial locale for Jesus in heaven (64–67), a setting that “positions and qualifies the geography of the entire narrative as produced under a Christological heaven” (79). This thirdspatial locale, combined with Jesus' Firstspace absence, is the very thing that creates the need for the disciples as witnesses (69, 77). As Sleeman notes, the list of places in Acts 1:7–8 lists both concrete firstspaces (i.e., Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria) and ideational secondspaces (“the end of the earth”). The ascension of Jesus “decentres believer-space” enabling the creating of different types of lived space for the disciples (75). These lived spaces, produced by Peter and the other disciples, allow for a different kind of spatial arrangement (85–91) characterized by shared meal practices, prayer together, and the sharing and distribution of material goods (103). These “believer-spaces” are in conflict with other types of spaces throughout the narrative. Such a reading of Acts demonstrates that “salvation within Acts is always found within believer-space” (259; emphasis original). Such spaces “are constrained by their heavenly locus (259) while at the same time “the particularist-but-absent Christofocal thirdspace commended with Acts translates into a resistance against alternative ownerships and allegiances and their rival spatial claims of both presence and absence” rendering any claim to a “centring function” for any other space “at best provisional” (260–61).
Conclusion
Social movements can exist only within space because they exist in particular places. Enormous amounts of material devoted to understanding the conceptions of time (e.g., when the kingdom of God will arrive) of ancient Israelites and early followers of Jesus has caused scholars to neglect the spatialities created and maintained by these groups. Recent studies have sought to redress this imbalance, and important theoretical insights from geographers and cultural theorists aid in understanding the production, control, and contestation of space in the textual remains of these communities.
Future studies on biblical space/spatiality will no doubt continue to refine these approaches. Archaeology and increased attention to non-literary remains will also help to describe the “lived spaces” of the people who populated Southwest Asia, Northern Africa, and the Hellenistic and Roman Empires. The contestation of the meaning of these places among their ancient inhabitants and modern interpreters will no doubt continue, since the meanings ascribed to these places then have resonances for the acquisition and control of these spaces now (Blenkinsopp).