"Marianne Sawicki brings to life the Galilee of Jesus' day. Using both archaeology and anthropology to situate Jesus clearly in his Galilean cultural context, she challenges recent studies of the historical Jesus and early Christianity. She calls into question readings of ancient Galilee as an economically stratified society marked by an "honor-shame" sociology.

Sawicki discovers the Galilean Jesus' indigenous cultural idiom in its material structures for the negotiation of kinship, the management of labor, the distribution of commodities, and the construction of gender. Crossing Galilee frames current issues in Jesus research that can guide ongoing archaeological excavations in Israel and responsible exegesis of the Gospels in church and academy."--BOOK JACKET.