Update on questions raised about credit and usury

In July of this year, Wilson raised questions about credit and usury to which I responded with a portrait of life for a Galilean peasant in an effort to locate Jesus' parables within a context that may well provide helpful interpretative keys in our consideration of questions of usury.

Towards the end of that thread, Wes asked questions about bibliographic sources that help us to examine the ancient context. I responded with several, all of which, as I recall, I found in NT Wright's Victory of God (or the series).

I post now to lift up a single chapter in a book that provides a relatively concise summary of all of this material. Indeed I think the entire book is a treasure. I commend chapter 2 of Ched Meyer's Binding the Straw Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus as the best summary I have found of fairly recent scholarship on the socio-economic and geo-political context of the first century. One caveat I must add is that I have not investigated how that scholarship has evolved since publication of Meyer's commentary. And for those who don't recall, this is the commentary that Dean Sam Wells calls the single most important commentary since Barth's commentary on Romans (or something to that hyperbolic effect).