New Testament Historical Background

Introduction to the Life of Christ — Steve Gregg

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New Testament Historical Background

Introduction to the Life of ChristSteve Gregg

Explore the historical background of the New Testament with Steve Gregg as he delves into why Jesus chose the specific time and place for his arrival. Gregg explains that despite technological limitations, the spread of the gospel relied on personal connections rather than advanced communication tools. He also highlights key moments in Jewish history, such as the Babylonian captivity and the reign of Antiochus IV, which influenced the cultural and political landscape during Jesus' time. Gain a deeper understanding of the events and circumstances that shaped the New Testament era in this informative discussion.

Transcript

Today we're going to continue with introductory material to the life of Christ. I've given you a handout which has at the top of it the material actually that we covered in yesterday's lecture, the reasons for studying the life of Christ, the historical reason, the cultural reason, theological reason, and the devotional reason. We talked about that in our entire period last time, and we will not go into it anymore.

Now I'd like to talk about the historical background of the life of Christ, and it's very important that we have some grasp of this, though perhaps it's not necessary to know as much detail about it as we're going to take on the subject. However, the more detail you know, especially the particular points that we're going to look at, the more you can feel that you have a grasp of what was really going on, culturally and historically at the time, and that is more important than one might immediately think. A lot of people, when they read the life of Christ and the teachings of Christ, they just feel that they can just divorce it from its historical setting and apply it across the board to something going on in their own life.

And in a few cases this may be a valid approach, but for the most part, Jesus' life and his words need to be interpreted in light of his times. That doesn't mean to say that his words are not equally relevant to our own times, but they may be relevant in a slightly different way or a slightly altered way because of the difference in the particular issues that were at the forefront of his audience's thinking and his desire to address those issues. We will begin going all the way back to Old Testament times, the times of Jeremiah and Daniel and Ezekiel, and we'll move forward from there, hopefully somewhat rapidly, to get a grasp of how those events led up to the times of the New Testament and the time in which Jesus came.

It's important for us, I think, to realize that the timing of the coming of Christ was not haphazard or accidental, as of course nothing is in the divine sovereignty haphazard or accidental, and certainly not something as important as the coming of Christ. I remember years ago hearing the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, in which the final monologue by Judas that Judas sings, interestingly Judas is alive after his death, but Jesus is not alive after his death in Jesus Christ Superstar, but after he's already dead, Judas comes back at the end to sing a closing monologue, and in the monologue he raises the question, why did Jesus come in such a backwater place, in such an un-technological time, if his message was really all that important, why didn't he come at a time when there was mass communication and rapid global transportation possible and so forth, and wouldn't that have been wiser than the way he did things? Well, of course Jesus Christ Superstar is in no way sympathetic to Christianity, it's against Christianity, and certainly against Christ and glorifies Judas, not Jesus, but the question might seem like a valid one, you know, why did God send Jesus at the time that he did, instead of some other time? Well, the fact of the matter is that if Jesus had come very much earlier than the time he did, there would have been tremendous obstacles to the spread of the gospel, language barriers, political barriers, that would have did not exist at the time when Jesus came and had only dissolved within a short time prior to his coming. And then of course if he had come much later, if he wanted to wait for technology, he would have had to wait centuries longer, and then it would have of course forestalled the salvation of the world by a few millennia.

We might not have to question God's choices in that matter, wishing to get more people saved earlier on, but we can, I think, and should question the whole proposition as to whether technology is even a boon to the gospel or not. The Superstar rock opera raises the question based on the presupposition that it would be an advantage to Jesus if he had radio and television at his disposal. Obviously Jesus did not, but I think we could probably counter that suggestion by raising the question of whether Christianity was more pure and more virile and more, competed better in the marketplace of ideas in the days since television and radio have come along than it did in the times prior.

In my personal opinion, Christianity is not what it once was, and television and radio are among the things that have helped to hasten its demise, partly because television and radio and other forms of mass communication very often are tailored to the sensational interests of people. They have to compete with secular programming, which means that they have to appeal to the carnal entertainment interest of listeners and viewers, and this tendency of the medium has, in my opinion, tended to reduce Christianity in the public eye to something frivolous, really, and silly to a large extent. This is not to say there has never been any good use made out of television or radio for the Kingdom of God.

I obviously believe in some use of the radio since I go on the radio myself, and I believe that Billy Graham crusades on television and some other things have been of value in spreading the gospel, but we should point out the fact that long before there were any of these technologies, when Jesus did come and send out his disciples, it only took them 30 years to reach the entire known world of their time, which was the Roman Empire. Had they known of a greater world, had they known about the Mayas and the Aztecs and the Aboriginals and so forth, they might have reached them within a short time afterwards too, it's hard to say. It's interesting that it did not require advanced technologies, it just took obedience, and one could even argue that Jesus did not intend for the gospel to be spread largely through technology, but through persons relating to persons.

The dynamic of the Christian life is love, and love is not visible through the silver screen or through the tube, it is visible in human relationships and in persons making contact with persons. And therefore, one might think that the timing of Jesus' coming was not opportune in the sense that he didn't have the advantages he would have had if he had come at this time, but that which we call advantages he might have considered to be disadvantages, and it's hard to know whether he would have made use of them if he had come at our own time, or whether these technologies were available when he was around. After all, there were many forums that Jesus did not avail himself of, even available in his own time.

He didn't ever go to Mars Hill to address the philosophers in public, and there's a number of things that Paul did and that Jesus did not bother to do. Hard to know what he would have done had he come at our time. But this much we can say on biblical authority, and that is that the time of Jesus' coming was opportune.

It was even, the Bible says, the fullness of times. It says that in Galatians 4, in verse 4. In Galatians 4, it says, But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. Now, actually the context preceding this suggests that this was a time specifically chosen by God, as opposed to other possible times.

He refers to the practice of adoption in the Roman world, how that the father decided when he believed it was time for his son to take over adult responsibilities. And it wasn't a set age in the Roman world, as opposed to the Jewish world. When a boy reached age 12 or 13, he was customarily bar mitzvahed, and he became a man.

He made the transition from a child with no real adult responsibilities to being a man who is now responsible before God to keep the law for himself. The Romans did not have a set age, but it was rather at the discretion of the father, in each case, to decide when he would put his son through that transition from childhood to manhood. And that's what Paul's talking about when he says in Galatians chapter 4, verses 1 and following, Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is the master of all, but he is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father.

Even so, we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world, he means the law, but when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, as we read a moment ago. Now, what he's saying is that the human race was like a child, which was destined to produce sons of God from its ranks, but for many centuries, it was like a race in its childhood and had to be kept under guardians, that is under the guardianship of the law, under tutors, until the time appointed by the father. And therefore, the human race, at least those who were desiring to be God's people, had to be kept under the law for hundreds of years because that was, as it were, the childhood of the race, not yet coming into full maturity, which God determined should come at a particular time.

This is like a child in a household who is under guardians and tutors until the time appointed by the father. And so, Paul is specifically stating that God had a particular time in view when he felt like the human race was ready or when it was simply his purpose to launch this campaign that involved Jesus coming to the world, when it was time for the kingdom of God to invade in force the kingdoms of darkness. And there are many factors that we can see helped to present this time for God to send Jesus into.

We can see that for one thing, when Paul says, in the fullness of time, that he could be alluding to certain biblical prophecies of the Old Testament because there were prophetic indicators as to when the Messiah might be expected. Some of those go all the way back to Genesis. In Genesis chapter 49, for example, when Jacob lay on his deathbed and was blessing his twelve sons with prophetic blessings about what their tribes would later accomplish or do.

Speaking of his son Judah, from which the tribe of Judah came, from which Jesus came, it says in Genesis 49, verses 9 and 10, Judah is a lion's welt from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He bows down, he lies down as a lion, and as a lion who shall rouse him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh comes, and to him shall the obedience of the people be. Shiloh is a word that means him to whom it belongs.

And the prophecy is essentially this, the scepter will not depart from the tribe of Judah, the scepter being an emblem of rulership, the scepter shall not depart from the tribe of Judah until he to whom it belongs comes. The rabbis understood this to be a reference to the Messiah, and I believe correctly so, though the rabbis were wrong about many things, I think they were correct in viewing this as a messianic prophecy. And it would suggest then that whenever the tribe of Judah would lose its power, whenever the Jews would lose their sovereignty and the scepter would depart from them, it would be time for Shiloh, him to whom it belongs, to come.

It's a veiled reference, but that was understood that way by the Jews, and it was quite correct, because in 37 BC, Herod the great, an Edomite, not a Jew, became the king of the Jews in Jerusalem, and sat in the place of rulership where David of the tribe of Judah and his descendants had once sat. And the rabbis bemoaned this fact at the time, and they said, woe unto us, for the scepter has departed from Judah, and Shiloh has not yet come. And so they understood that they were living in a transition time.

The scepter now had departed from Judah, it had passed to a pagan, Herod the great, and they understood that according to prophecy, Shiloh was supposed to be there at that time. And of course we know that that generation didn't pass before Jesus was born, in fact he was born only a few years prior to the death of Herod the great. So that generation had come when the Messiah would appear.

Another prophecy, far more specific as to the timing, was in Daniel chapter 9. In Daniel chapter 9 we have the prophecy of the 70 weeks, which we of course cannot get into in great detail at this time, but simply to give you an overview of its prediction. Daniel 9 verses 24 through 27. Daniel had an angel appear to him and give him this information.

70 weeks are determined. Now the word weeks means, actually in Hebrew means sevens. Seventy sevens, which is really another way of saying 490 of something.

Most interpreters believe, and I am in agreement with them, that the sevens refer to seven years. So seventy sevens, or seventy times seven years, some call them weeks of years, seventy weeks of years, would be 490 years. Seventy weeks, or sevens, are determined upon your people, that's Israel, and your holy city, that's Jerusalem, to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy.

Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem, until Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, that's seven sevens, 49 years, and 62 weeks. So altogether 69 weeks. Seven plus 62 makes 69 sevens, that makes 483 years altogether.

And then it says, and the streets shall be built and the wall even in troublesome times, and after 62 weeks, or after the 62 weeks, the Messiah shall be cut off, but not for himself. And the people of the Prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary, the end of it shall be with the flood, until the end of the war, desolations are determined. And he, I take to be the Messiah, the last previously mentioned person, who is the subject of a sentence, he shall confirm a covenant with many for one week, that is seven years, but in the middle of the week, after three and a half years, he shall bring an end to the sacrifice and offering, which I understand to be effective when Jesus died.

Three and a half years into his ministry, he brought an end to the sacrificial system by offering up the final sacrifice of himself. And on the wing of abomination shall be one that makes desolate. Jesus referred to this as the abomination of desolation, and we saw that by comparing Matthew's version of that and Luke's, it was the coming of the Romans to destroy Jerusalem, even as verse 26 talks about.

And so forth. Now the point here is that there's a total period of 490 years that is in view. It begins, it says, from the command in verse 25 to restore and build Jerusalem.

In Daniel's day, Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians. Daniel himself was an exile in Babylon. And the angel told him that there was a total of 490 years that would be relevant to the Jews, particularly from the time of the going forth of the command to build and restore Jerusalem.

The problem is there were three such commands. One by Cyrus in 536 BC and then later on or 530, excuse me, 538 BC. And then there were two later decrees, both by Artaxerxes.

Cyrus's decree was that which releases a rubble and the original returnees back to build Jerusalem. But Artaxerxes on two occasions gave similar decrees. One was to release Ezra and those who accompanied him.

The other was to send Nehemiah and a few others with him back to Jerusalem. There were three decrees and they were all three different years and it's not known with certainty which decree is in view. Although certainly one of the ones of Artaxerxes seems to be the correct one.

I personally believe the first decree of Artaxerxes is to be favored. We'll talk about that more in detail at another time. But the point is that whichever of these you measure from forward 490 years or 70 weeks, you come to the general period of time in which Jesus ministered.

In fact, if you measure from the first decree of Artaxerxes, the 69th week, and that's the time it said from the command to restore and build Jerusalem until the coming of Messiah the Prince would be seven weeks and 62 weeks. So 69, 483 years. Measuring forward from the first decree of Artaxerxes, 483 years brings you to the year 26 or 27 AD.

The year when traditionally Jesus is believed to have begun his ministry, having been crucified in the year 30 AD. So certainly Daniel gives some very specific information about when the Messiah would come. We can see when Paul says when the fullness of time had come that he was not just speaking theoretically.

There were specific predictions in the Old Testament that indicated that the Messiah would come about that time that he did. But why that time instead of some other? Why did God choose that time? Well, some understanding of that can be gotten by looking at the historical background of the Jews and of the region Judea and Galilee where Jesus was from prior to the time of his coming. If we go back to 586 BC, we are at the time when Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.

There were actually three deportations of Jews from Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar came three times. The first two times he took only a few of the citizens of Jerusalem into captivity with him.

Daniel was carried away in the first deportation and Ezekiel was carried away in the second. And in the third, which was 586 BC, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the entire city and temple of Jerusalem and carried the rest of the inhabitants into captivity with the exception of only the poorest of the people who were left there to farm the land. But the vast majority of the citizens were carried away into Babylon.

And while in Babylon the rabbis were concerned that without a temple to present solidarity of faith to the Jews, since their religion was sustained by a daily temple worship, it was necessary for them to create some alternatives for the Jews that would hopefully keep them from forgetting their religion altogether. One of the Psalms, Psalm 137 I believe it is, is written by an exile in Babylon expressing concern that he might forget Jerusalem and that he might forget his Jewish distinctives and he actually wishes a cursive on himself if that should happen. That's Psalm 137 which begins with the words, By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept and we remembered Zion or Jerusalem.

It's written by a captive in Babylon. But he goes on down further and says in verse 5, If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. If I do not remember you, let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.

If I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy. There was the danger that the Jews being away from Jerusalem for something like two or three generations because God did visit the iniquity of those who hated him upon this third generation. There were the generation that went into Babylon, a generation that was born and mostly died in Babylon and a third generation that was born there, some of whom were able to return.

God's judgment to the third generation of those that hate him as he promised or threatened in Exodus chapter 20 and verse 6 was fulfilled. Now the problem with the devout was that they knew that if they were going to be gone a long time from Jerusalem with this decentralization of the Jewish religion, there would be little to maintain the cohesiveness of the Jewish religion and therefore the rabbis came up with a number of institutions in Babylon to help preserve the distinctives of the Jewish people there. They created for example an institution called the Great Synagogue.

It's a synagogue in Babylonian captivity. Eventually synagogues were established in every Gentile city where there were ten adult male Jews or more. If there were fewer than ten adult male Jews in any given town, there would be no synagogue but they would nonetheless meet together on Sabbath, the Jews that were there, in order to worship God on the Sabbath.

If there were ten adult male Jews or more, they would actually establish a synagogue and they would have their Sabbath services there. This replaced temple worship for the time being and eventually when the temple was rebuilt, synagogue worship continued, not only in the Gentile cities but after they went back to Palestine in the Jewish cities as well. In Paul's day when he spread the gospel, these synagogues actually provided a beach head initially for the establishment of the gospel in every city in the empire where there were ten adult male Jews or more.

One city Paul went to didn't have that many adult male Jews, Philippi. When he went to Philippi, because there was no synagogue there and obviously a very small Jewish population, he went down by a river on the Sabbath where some Jewish people were worshipping and there he met Lydia who became one of the first converts and her house became the first church in that city. But in most cities, because of the dispersion from which most Jews never returned, when the Babylonians carried them away, most Jews never returned back to Palestine.

In Jesus' day, fewer than half a million Jews lived in Palestine and something like three million Jews lived elsewhere in the world. But these Jews were in cities where they met in synagogues. So when Paul carried the gospel to these Gentile lands, he could immediately have access to a body of unbelievers in the synagogue who were Jews and some Gentiles who were God-fearers who attended there too.

And as a rabbi, Paul was often welcome to come and speak because a synagogue didn't have priests like the temple did. The function of the temple was to slaughter animals and priests were the slaughterers. But a synagogue was not a place where sacrifices were offered.

The law forbade that. It was more like your modern local church meeting. As a matter of fact, the early church meetings were apparently styled after those of the synagogue.

We need to remember the temple of the Jews was never the corresponding part to what the church is to the Christians today. That is the local church to which you go on Sunday morning or whatever day you go. The temple was nothing less than a bloody slaughterhouse where thousands of animals weekly were slaughtered and their blood was spilled.

It was not a weekly place of worship and it wasn't for the most part a gathering place for all the Jews because there just wasn't room for all the Jews who came on pilgrimage. But most of the Jews met on Sabbaths in the synagogues in their own towns. There were no sacrifices offered there and in order to offer sacrifices they had to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

This is of course at a later time after the Babylonian captivity when the temple was rebuilt. But we should not think of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem as the Jewish counterpart to what we call church. The temple is in fact the Jewish counterpart to the true church, the body of Christ, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit today, which offers up spiritual sacrifices.

The body of Christ as a spiritual entity is the counterpart of the Old Testament temple. But as far as what we call churches today, the counterpart to the Jews was the synagogue. But these didn't exist before the Babylonian captivity.

But by the time of Christ and Paul they were everywhere. Jesus spoke in the synagogues all over Galilee as well as teaching in the temple when he was down in Jerusalem. But most of his ministry was conducted in synagogues because there was a ready audience of Jewish people who were curious to hear what this rabbi would say.

And since the synagogues were numerous and since they would exist everywhere where there was only ten adult male Jews, often of course among ten adult male Jews there wasn't a single trained rabbi among them. I mean let's face it, in a city where there's only ten adult male Jews, most likely you're going to have a baker and a butcher and a candlestick maker but not any theologians. And so if there was a traveling rabbi, the synagogues were always eager to have him come and speak in their synagogue.

And there was a president of the synagogue in most cases who would sort of keep the meeting orderly, maybe read scripture if there was no one else to do it. But if there was ever a rabbi in town, they'd always be glad to have him speak in the synagogue. That's why Jesus was able to go into every synagogue even though he was not a resident of the towns that he was traveling in, but he had a reputation of being a rabbi and so they always wanted to hear what he had to say.

Sometimes they threw him out after he said it, but he usually had access initially. And same with Paul and Barnabas because Paul was a rabbi and he was able to get into there. And so the establishment of the great synagogue and the individual synagogues in every town was laying a foundation for later evangelism in Israel and outside of Israel and the entire Roman world.

And both Jesus and Paul later exploited them in order to establish the first beat. Consider how hard it would have been to establish a church in a foreign city without the synagogue already there. The Jews had already laid the groundwork.

There was already a group of people who knew something about God and cared something about God, the same God that Paul was preaching. They just didn't know about the Messiah yet. And so he found people whose hearts were already prepared.

How much different it would have been if there had been no synagogue, no established Jewish population or worship center in a given town and Paul had to go in there and just start from scratch on the street corner and try to gather interested listeners. You see the establishment of the synagogue was a response to the destruction of the temple in 586 BC, but it became something that continued on until modern times. There are still synagogues in modern cities.

And in the time of Jesus it was a very important institution for Jesus' ministry and for Paul's in spreading the gospel beyond the borders of Judaism and of Palestine. Also some other things that began to happen as a result of the Babylonian captivity is a group of persons called scribes arose. These were largely priests because the priests had been given custody of the law of Moses.

Remember there were no printing presses in those days. Therefore you couldn't just run off a few thousand copies of the Bible for people to use in worship service. Each copy had to be assiduously hand copied, which was time consuming and probably very costly.

And therefore God had established back in the days of Moses that the law would be kept in the custody of the priests and that they would teach it to the people at their worship festivals. In fact every seventh year the entirety of the law was to be read to the standing multitudes of men, women and children on the Feast of Tabernacles. And by this method every Jew by the time they were 21 years old or so would have heard the entire law read orally at least three times in their lifetime and possibly more depending on where their birth date fell.

But, excuse me, that's the proof of authenticity of this tape. The scribes were the guys who sort of served as the printing presses for the law. They began to recopy the law and also became the interpreters of the law to a large extent and the teachers of the law.

And the scribes came along in order to keep the law alive in the conscience of the Jewish people in exile. One of the greatest scribes who ever lived was Ezra. We're told in Ezra chapter 7 verse 10 he was a ready scribe in the things of God and he was a godly one at that.

By the time Jesus came, however, the scribes had become kind of legalistic to say the least. And anyone can understand that. They were experts in the law.

I mean, are lawyers legalistic? Are policemen legalistic? I mean, obviously scribes whose duty it is to become experts at law and the interpretation of law and so forth would tend to be legalistic in their orientation. And unfortunately this made them a little bit inflexible. They tended to lose sight of the things that really mattered.

They began to make sure every jot and tittle were in place in terms of the legalistic observance of the law but they forgot the weightier matters of the law. Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees, you pay your tithes of mint, anise, and cumin but you neglect the weightier matters of the law. And so the scribes, whom Jesus frequently associated with the Pharisees in his condemnation of them, had forgotten the real big issues.

But one service they did perform and that was to preserve the law at a time when there was no centralized priesthood in Jerusalem to do so. By the way, in times later than Christ's time, there continued to be scribes until the invention of the printing press. I don't suppose we have scribes handwriting scriptures today.

They probably use word processors now and printing presses to multiply their copies. But there was a group of scribes in the centuries following the time of Christ called the Masoretic scribes or the Masoretes. And they produced what is known today as the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, which was the only text of the Old Testament that survived into modern times with the exception of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found back in the late 40s of this century, the only text of the Old Testament that had survived to modern times was the Masoretic text. It dated from about 1008 AD. And yet when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, it also contained an earlier text, a thousand years earlier, text of the Old Testament.

When it was compared with the Masoretic text, it was almost word for word identical. It was word for word identical in 95% of the material and the other 5%, as we studied earlier in the school, was said to have been consisting of obvious slips of the pen, misspelled words, changes in word order of the sentence but not changing the meaning. In other words, there is very, very little slippage, very little deterioration or what's called corruption in the manuscripts from the time that the Dead Sea Scrolls were inscribed at the time of Christ and the time the Masoretic text came into existence a thousand years later.

In a thousand years of copying, the Masoretes had preserved the text 95% pure. And the reason they were able to do that, and that's almost astonishing. I mean, it is astonishing.

It's almost miraculous. It may even be miraculous. But it is attributed to the fact that the Masoretes were very, very careful, to say the least, in the way they transcribed the scriptures.

And you have probably heard about it, how they counted every letter and every word on every page. And if the copy didn't agree to the letter with the one they had worked from, they just threw it out and started over again. And so, anyway, the scribes, the Masoretes who preserved the scripture in written form were the scribes.

That was a group of men that were established during the Babylonian exile. Of course, as I said, by the time Jesus came along, they were fairly inflexible. They had lost sight of the greater issues of concern to God.

And therefore, Jesus had a lot of negative things to say about them, along with the Pharisees. We'll talk about them later. Another thing that began with the Babylonian captivity was the oral traditions of the elders.

Now because there was not the ability to control the Jewish religious life quite as much in exile as they had been able to when there was a centralized worship in Jerusalem. And of course, the reason for that is that when there was centralized worship in Jerusalem, the Jews from all over the world had to come there three times a year. And therefore, there could be some monitoring or some continual input into the Jews' religious life so that they couldn't drift too far from their ideals.

But for the 70 years they spent in Babylon, there was no centralized worship. Therefore, a group of rabbis, that is teachers, felt that it was necessary to safeguard the Jewish behavior and the keeping of the law by establishing what they called a hedge around the law. Now, when we speak of a hedge about the law, this is the rabbinic term they used, it meant this, that the law, you know, there were certain vague commands in the law.

Like a person could divorce his wife if he found some uncleanness in her. But what constitutes uncleanness and what therefore would be grounds for divorce? Or the Bible says you shall do no labor on the Sabbath and bear no burden on the Sabbath. But what constitutes labor? And what constitutes a burden? And in order to answer these questions, the rabbis in the Babylonian exile decided that they had best do some very specific defining of the perimeters.

And to actually make sure that the law was not violated, they put a hedge around it, which would mean that they made it more strict and more definite. And that way, if people were prevented from violating these oral traditions, they would clearly be prevented from breaking the law itself. Now, initially, I suppose the rabbis knew that there was a difference between what the law said and what their interpretations of it were or what their additions were.

But by the time of Jesus, all distinction between what was the word of man and what was the word of God had vanished, at least in the mind of the thinking Jew. They had 30 some odd pages, eventually when they wrote this all down, of instructions and statutes about Sabbath keeping. What constituted labor? What did not constitute labor? What constituted bearing a burden? What did not constitute bearing a burden? And the rabbis had their opinions about this.

These opinions and many thousands of others were passed along orally from the time of the Babylonian captivity on. And eventually, there was a group of people called the Pharisees who were devoted to the preservation and enforcing of these oral traditions. They were, by the time of Jesus, these oral traditions were called the traditions of the elders.

And Jesus, in some of his major clashes with the Pharisees, was clashing over this issue of the traditions of the elders. And the problem was that the Jewish people, especially the Pharisees, had come to think of the human traditions that were made up by the rabbis during the Babylonian exile and since as having the same weight as the actual scriptures themselves. They lost sight and they were, as Jesus accused them in Mark chapter 7, they were teaching for doctrines, the traditions of men.

Now, these traditions were not written down in the days of Jesus, but they were well known among the rabbis. They sat and discussed them all the time orally. It wasn't until the third century that they were codified into a written form, which was called the Talmud.

Actually, the Talmud is divisible into two portions, what's called the Mishnah and the Gemara. That's not particularly necessary for you to know to understand your studies of the life of Christ, but the Talmud is the written form of these traditions that were passed down from the Babylonian period on and preserved orally for many centuries and then only a couple centuries after Christ were actually written down. The Talmud, of course, today is still the basis of Orthodox Judaism.

And in fact, there are Orthodox Jews that are not the least bit ashamed to tell you that Orthodox Judaism today is the direct spiritual descendant of Phariseeism of Jesus' day. There are rabbis who have boasted in this. Remember, the word Pharisee is only a negative term to the Christian.

It's not a negative term to the Jew. To the Jew, the Pharisees were the heroes of the story. To the Christian, they were the culprits, because they were the enemies of Christ.

But the Jew today is not ashamed at all to associate, though that is the Orthodox conservative type Jews, they're not ashamed at all to associate with the Pharisees because they are the descendants of the Pharisees in terms of their belief system. Talmudic Judaism, that is the Judaism that goes by the traditions of the Talmud, is exactly today what Phariseeism was in Jesus' day. An establishment of norms based upon the traditions of the rabbis to the extent that they either are equal to or even in some cases eclipse the authority of Scripture itself.

And that is the main complaint that Jesus found with them. No doubt their intentions originally were good in saying, well, we don't want people breaking Sabbath, so we better make sure they understand exactly what constitutes the breach of Sabbath and what does not. So they make up all these rules.

But really the sad thing about that is that's the essence of what legalism is, is adding to the Word of God rules that God did not include and just eventually there's no end to them. They just multiply and multiply and multiply until religion is nothing more than a 20-volume encyclopedia of do's and don'ts. And whereas obeying God has never really been that complex, as the prophets sometimes pointed out.

What does God want? Well, how about do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. That'll do it. All these many, many rules were not important, not necessary.

But this legalism actually goes back all the way to the Garden of Eden because God told Adam that they should not eat of the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And Eve, when she was confronted about this by the serpent, he said, has God forbidden you or has God allowed you to eat all the trees of the garden? And she said, well, of all the trees of the garden we may freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil we may not eat, neither shall we touch it lest we die. Now she added the part about touching it.

That wasn't from God. And I don't know that things would have turned out any differently had she not added to the Word of God, but you can see immediately legalism creeping in. If we're not allowed to eat it, then we'd be better not even touching it.

Fair enough, that's probably true. But good advice is not the same thing as the commands of God. It is out of fear that people will fall into alcoholism, that some Christians forbid any drinking of alcohol in any circumstances.

But that goes beyond the Word of God. The Word of God does not forbid all use of alcohol, but it does forbid drunkenness. And many of the advocates of teetotaling and of total absence of alcohol do so on the basis that, well, you know, every alcoholic took a first drink.

You know, and a person who starts out social drinking might, you know, never can tell when they're going to end up drunk. True enough. And for that reason, it may be very excellent advice not to drink at all.

I can accept that as good advice. But to call that the law of God is to begin to mix human and divine instructions. If it was wrong to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then of course it's a good advice not to touch the fruit either.

If you don't touch it, you can't eat it. But God didn't say not to touch it. He just said not to eat it.

And therefore, you know, when you begin to add human regulations to what God has said, it's not long before your conscience is bound to those human regulations as strongly as to the words of God. And it's a phenomenon present in modern churches as well. You grow up in a church where, you know, communion has to be taken once a month.

And if you go a month without it, you feel almost like maybe your Christian life is on the rocks. Or if you're in a place where you have to take it once a week, similar, you know. There's all kinds of some people feel, you know, like they're dishonoring God if they don't go to church in a certain time.

Because that's the tradition they've been raised with. And they can't separate in their mind the human tradition from what really God has required. And that's that's the problem with human nature.

Instead of simply saying, what did God say? How can I do what God said? How can I be obedient to God? We always try to institutionalize and add to and build a hedge around what God said. And that tendency in Judaism began, or at least it became a principal factor during the Babylonian captivity with the establishment of the rabbinic teachers who began to develop their oral interpretations of the law, or as they put it, building a hedge around the law. Okay, now the Jews remained in exile for a good long time.

Remember 586 was the year that the last batch of them went in. The first batch of Jews began to return from Babylon in 539 BC. And this happened as a result of the Persians conquering Babylon.

A man named Cyrus, the Persian, conquered Babylon, marched his troops under the wall, actually in the dry river Euphrates bed, and took the city because the city was not expecting an attack. He took it without a fight, actually. And that was the end of the Babylonian Empire.

Belshazzar the king was killed that night. Cyrus the Persian took over, and the Medes and the Persians jointly ruled the empire for some long time, for about 200 years. One of the things Cyrus did was to repatriate the peoples that Nebuchadnezzar had taken into captivity into Babylon, not just the Jews, but other ethnic groups too.

Babylon, when he had conquered various lands, he had taken many of the inhabitants into Babylon as he took the Jews into Babylon. But when Cyrus came to power, he decided to allow the peoples to go back to their places of national origin, and that included the Jews. And he specifically specified that the Jews could rebuild their temple and their capital in Jerusalem.

That was the first decree to build and restore Jerusalem. There were two others later. But 539 BC is when Persia conquered Babylon, and the next year, 538, is in all likelihood the date of the first exiles returning from Babylon to Jerusalem under the leadership of a guy named Zerubbabel.

Zerubbabel was a direct biological descendant of the kings of Jerusalem. He was descended from David through the kingly line, but he never became king. He was simply made governor.

The nation of Israel from this time until its doom in 70 AD remained, for the most part, a vassal paying tribute to larger powers. One exception, there was a short period of maybe close to 100 years after they threw off the Syrian dominion of Antiochus Epiphanes, which we'll talk about later, when they were able to have a bit of independence for a short time until the Romans came and conquered them. But for the most part, the Jews never had a king of their own again from the line of David after this time, but one of the descendants of David from that line was the governor.

His name was Zerubbabel, and the books of Haggai and Zechariah were written during that time when Zerubbabel and those who came back to Jerusalem with him from Babylon were rebuilding the temple. In 332, about 200 years later, after Zerubbabel's time, there was another major turnover in power, and that was because of Alexander the Great, son of Philip of Macedon, the king of Greece and Macedon. He began leading his armies against all the surrounding areas of the Persian Empire and conquered them all in 12 years.

He began when he was 20 years old, and by the time he was 32, he had conquered the Persian Empire, which had previously conquered the Babylonian Empire. Now, when Alexander was approaching Jerusalem to conquer it, according to Josephus, the priest, the high priest of Jerusalem met Alexander entering the city, and the priest was carrying the scrolls of the prophet Isaiah's prophecy. And Daniel had actually predicted these conquests of Alexander, and the priest read these to Alexander, and according to Josephus, Alexander acknowledged that these were genuine prophecies and that the God of the Jews must be a true God, and therefore he came and actually worshipped in the temple, and he did not destroy Jerusalem, and instead he made the Jews governors in many of his provinces, and he treated the Jews fairly well.

His career did not last very long after his conquest, because he died in the year 323 BC. His cause of death is not certain. Some say he died of syphilis, some say he drank himself to death in depression because there were no more worlds to conquer.

At age 32, he'd reached the pinnacle of his success, and he was going through a major midlife crisis, and so he was suicidal or whatever. There are conflicting stories, but when Alexander died, his two sons were also assassinated, and that left only his four leading generals to decide among themselves who would be the successor to the Grecian Empire. Now, unfortunately, all four of his leading generals wanted to be the next Alexander, wanted to be the successor, but none of them was powerful enough to subdue the other three.

And so, eventually, by mutual agreement, in 301 BC, the Empire of Alexander was divided four ways between the four generals. Two of them become significant to the biblical story and to the history of Palestine. Two of them that were not significant to the story were Cassander and Lysimachus.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing Lysimachus correctly, but those long Greek names, it's always hard to know where the accent belongs, unless you're an expert at Greek. Cassander and Lysimachus were a couple of Alexander's generals that do not figure prominently into the biblical story at all. However, the other two, Ptolemy and Seleucus, are significant, because Ptolemy was a general who took over that portion of the Empire that was south of Palestine, which was in Egypt.

And Seleucus, who actually had been once an officer under Ptolemy, he branched off and took over the region up in Syria, to the north of Israel. And therefore, there was the Syrian Empire under Seleucus, and then there was the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt under Ptolemy and his successors. Now, as the centuries went by, the kings in Egypt were the Ptolemies.

Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II, Ptolemy III, Ptolemy IV, and so forth. In the north, in Syria, the kings... what do I know? You got a question? I'll tell you what it is. Ptolemies were in Egypt.

Ptolemies ruled Egypt for a long time. There was Ptolemy I, II, III, IV, and V, and so forth. In the north, in Syria, that was the Seleucid dynasty, starting with Seleucus I, followed by Antiochus I, and then Seleucus II, Antiochus II, Seleucus III, and so forth, alternating between guys who called themselves Seleucus or Antiochus.

Antioch, of course, became the principal city in Syria. It also became the principal place where the church sent missionaries from in the early days to the Gentile world. But Antiochus IV was a particular problem to the Jews, and he was a king of Syria to the north.

But for the first hundred years or so, after the kingdom was divided four ways, the Jews and their land, Palestine, was under the rule of the Ptolemies. It was under Egyptian rule. And it wasn't too bad in those days.

The Ptolemies were pretty tolerant of the Jewish ways. Actually, Alexandria, Egypt, became a major center of Jewish scholarly activity. It was in Alexandria during this time under the Ptolemies that the Jews produced the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament.

Allegedly, 70-something scholars, hence the name Septuagint, which means 70, 70 Jewish scholars or 77 Jewish scholars are said to have worked on the project of translating the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. This around the year 285 BC, which was during the time that the Jews were under the control of the Ptolemies in Egypt. But they prospered well under the Ptolemies and had a very peaceful time.

That certainly changed when they came under the power of the Seleucid dynasty. So the Septuagint was translated into Greek during the time of Ptolemaic rule over Palestine. And by the way, the Septuagint is the version of the Old Testament that is most often quoted in the New Testament.

Because it became the standard Bible of the Greek-speaking world. And therefore, when the apostles quoted scripture in their epistles, they almost always quoted the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew scriptures. Whereas our Bible, if you read the Old Testament, you're reading a translation made from the Hebrew scriptures into English.

If you read the quotations of those passages in the New Testament, you'll read the English translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew. That is, you're reading an English translation of the Septuagint, which was quoted by the New Testament writers. And that's why you'll sometimes find differences in the way that the Old Testament passages read when quoted by the apostles in the New Testament, as opposed to when you read them in the Old Testament.

You're reading an Old Testament that's translated directly from Hebrew into English. But the Old Testament scriptures quoted in the New Testament come by way of the Septuagint. So it's translated from Hebrew to Greek, then to English.

There have been some modifications. The Septuagint was not a perfect translation. But it was good enough, apparently, to be used for evangelism and for nurturing the churches in the early days.

And it had its origins around 285 BC, during the Ptolemaic period. And the Ptolemies ruled in Palestine for about 103 years, until 198 BC. At that time, the Seleucids in Syria took control of Palestine, won it from the Egyptians.

And at that time, it was pretty rough for the Jews. From about 198 to 167, the Jews suffered under the Seleucid reign and rule. There was a definite attempt on the part of the Syrian rulers to try to impose Greek culture on Jerusalem.

And that would mean the replacement of the Hebrew language with the Greek language. Or perhaps they were speaking at that time not Hebrew, but Aramaic, and replacing that with Greek language. Greek customs, Greek culture, even Greek gods were attempted to be introduced.

Even a Colosseum for Greek games was built in Jerusalem, which scandalized many of the devout Jews. Since, according to the Greek customs, the runners in footraces ran nude. Which didn't bother the Greeks any, but the more devout Jews thought that was a bit immodest.

And what's worse, since the Greeks were not circumcised, and the Jews were, those that favored the Greek and Hellenistic customs, especially those who ran in the nude, began to be ashamed of their circumcision. And there was actually developed a surgery that was developed to remove the marks of circumcision for those who were ashamed of the fact they were circumcised, and wished to demonstrate by their nude involvement in the games that they were not Jews, but Greeks. All of this, of course, was a very corrupting influence on the Jewish faith, but there was, at that time, a group of Jews that arose to resist this Hellenizing influence.

Hellenizing refers to Greek culture and Greek customs. And so the Jews divided about this time, under the Assyrian rule, into the Hellenistic and the Hasidic parties. The Hasidic parties were the devout ones, the pious ones, the pure ones, who wanted to maintain the purity.

They were the purists of Judaism at this time. There were the Hellenists who were willing to compromise Jewish ways and adopt Greek ways, and give up their Jewish distinctiveness, but the Hasidic Jews refused to do this. And they insisted upon keeping the Jewish law and resisting Hellenization of their culture.

This went badly for them from time to time, because they were so devout, the Hasidic Jews were so devout, that on the Sabbath day, they wouldn't even lift a sword to defend themselves when attacked. And many of them were slaughtered on occasions when the Assyrians came in to just ransack the place on various occasions. If it happened to be the Sabbath day, the Hasidic Jews wouldn't even lift anything, including a sword, to defend themselves, whereas they would have on other days of the week.

And they were often just slaughtered in cold blood because of their devotion to the Sabbath. Well, this Syrian rule was rather hard to take. It was a lot harder on the Jews than the Egyptian rule had been.

But things really came to a head in 168 BC. This is a key date that you should fix in your mind, if you can. 168 BC was the time of the original abomination of desolation.

We read in Daniel chapter 9 something about an abomination that makes it desolate, but Daniel actually has reference to two different abominations of desolation. In Daniel 9, which we read, he talks about after the Messiah is cut off, after Messiah dies, the people of the prince that shall come shall ransack the city and destroy the city and leave it desolate and they shall bring in an abomination that makes it desolation. That is, of course, something after the time of Christ.

Jesus himself referred to it in the Olivet Discourse when he said, when you shall see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel. Obviously, Jesus was talking about something yet future from his point of time. And of course, we know from comparing that with Luke that it was the Roman armies coming in and destroying the temple.

But prior to that, there was an abomination of desolation that happened in 168 BC. This also was predicted in Daniel. In Daniel chapter 10 and 11, and by the way, when we study Daniel, we'll have occasion to look more carefully at the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid dynasties because Daniel, amazingly, before the rise even of the Greek Empire at all, predicted in detail the intrigues and wars between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids.

In Daniel chapter, especially chapter 11 of Daniel, he talks about the king of the south and the king of the north and the king of the south that did this, the king of the north will do that. And the king of the north, in every case, is the king of the Syrian or Seleucid dynasty. And the king of the south throughout these prophecies is the king of the Egyptian or the Ptolemaic dynasty.

But it's different ones because Daniel actually spans the entire time from Alexander the Great until 168 BC. And the Seleucid king at this time was Antiochus IV. He called himself Antiochus Epiphanes, which you may have heard the name, Antiochus Epiphanes.

Epiphanes means the illustrious one. And Antiochus Epiphanes was the name he gave himself, Antiochus the illustrious one. His enemies, and he had many, gave him another name.

They called him Antiochus Epimanes, which is similar sounding but has a totally different meaning. Epimanes is Greek for madman. And so he called himself Antiochus Epiphanes.

They called him Antiochus Epimanes. And only a slight difference, but the difference was between an illustrious one and a madman. And he was the first prototype, as most dispensationalists would say, of the Antichrist.

Because he did everything that the dispensationalists say the Antichrist is going to do. He defiled the temple. He put an end to Jewish worship for about three years or so.

And did many of the things that dispensationalists look for a future Antichrist to do. In fact, he did so many of them that one wonders whether there is a future Antichrist to expect or whether Antiochus Epiphanes was simply the one who fulfilled the prophecies along those lines. But in Daniel chapter 11, if you might want to turn there, I suppose you will.

There is a portion, a lengthy portion of this where it talks about Antiochus Epiphanes. And just glancing down, I forget which verse is where it begins. I think it's around verse 22 or so.

But down in verse 31, Daniel 11, 31, it says, and forces shall be mustered by him and they shall defile the sanctuary fortress. Then they shall take away the daily sacrifices and place there the abomination of desolation. Those who do wickedly against the covenant, that's the Hellenistic Jews who compromised with Antiochus Epiphanes, he shall corrupt with flattery.

But the people who know their God, that was the Hasidic Jews, the Hasidim, shall be strong and carry out great exploits. And those of the people who understand shall instruct many. Yet for many days they shall fall by the sword and flame, by captivity and plundering.

Now, when they fall, they shall be aided with a little help, but many shall join with them by intrigue. And some of those of understanding shall fall to refine them, purify them and make them white until the time of the end, because it is still for the appointed time. Now, he in verse 31 is Antiochus Epiphanes.

By the way, it doesn't matter what one's prophetic interpretations are. They all agree on this point. There is no question in anybody's mind.

Scholars of the dispensational or non-dispensational, liberal or conservative all agree he in verse 21, 31 is Antiochus Epiphanes. There's no doubting it. When you go through the chapter, it just leads right up to that particular historical point.

By the way, this is one of the reasons why liberals deny that Daniel wrote this chapter or any of the book of Daniel. They say he lived too early. He couldn't have known about Antiochus Epiphanes.

He couldn't have given such specific predictions about what Antiochus Epiphanes would do. Even the liberals know that this passage is about Antiochus Epiphanes, but since they don't believe in the genuineness of predictive prophecy, because they don't believe in the supernatural, they say, well, this book must have been written after the time of Antiochus in order to so specifically tell of what he did. There's no question about it.

The first abomination of desolation was done by Antiochus Epiphanes. Here's how the story goes. Antiochus sought to invade and conquer Egypt.

The problem with these wars between Egypt and Syria was that Palestine lay in between. Whenever the Syrian king, Antiochus or Seleucus, whoever it happened to be, wanted to invade Egypt, he had to go through Israel because it lay right in between geographically. So he trips his troops through Palestine and went down to Egypt.

While he was about ready to conquer Egypt, the Romans, who were increasing in power at this time in history, sent a ship to tell Antiochus not to do it. The Romans saw Antiochus as a competitor for power with themselves, and they did not look forward to him gaining power over Egypt, which would only strengthen him against them. Antiochus, in his earlier youth, had actually spent time as a captive in Rome, and he had gained some respect for the Roman power.

The Roman captain confronted Antiochus in the sands of the Egyptian desert and said to him, listen, you've got to turn back. Rome commands you to turn back and not conquer Egypt. Antiochus said, well, I'll think about it.

The Roman captain drew a circle in the sand around Antiochus where he was standing and said, well, you think about it all you want, but don't step outside the circle until you order your troops back to Syria. Because he was intimidated by the Romans, Antiochus obeyed and did send his troops back, but because he was humiliated and outraged, he was full of wrath that he wanted to take out on somebody, and the Jews just happened to lay right in his line of fire. And so he came, and by the way, there's other things that happened that we can't go into detail, but prior to this time, there had been many intrigues and political moves made to gain the high priesthood.

Different priests and non-priests were trying to become the high priest in Jerusalem, and different guys had paid off Antiochus at different times to get an appointment. One guy was appointed by him, and then another guy paid him more, and he put him out and put a new guy in. But what happened, while Antiochus was down in Egypt confronting the Romans down there, the former high priest who had been removed by Antiochus put out of office the more recent high priest that Antiochus put in office because he heard a false rumor that Antiochus had been killed in battle in Egypt.

And therefore, he took possession of the high priesthood again. Well, when Antiochus came back and heard about it, he felt that was treason. So along with the humiliation he felt down in Egypt, he also saw what he perceived as treason among the Jews, and he decided to really do them hurt.

And he sent his general, Apollonius, and an army of 22,000 soldiers down to ransack the city and collect tribute and outlaw Judaism and enforce paganism. He wiped out thousands of Jews, many of them in cold blood, and he made it a capital offense to circumcise your child, to possess a copy of the scriptures, to keep Sabbath, or to practice any Jewish festivals. Now, of course, you can understand this put the godly Jews in a hard spot.

They could be put to death for circumcising their children, yet the law of their gods said they had to. They could be put to death for keeping Sabbath or keeping the Jewish festivals, but God said they had to do it. And therefore, it became a time of great suffering.

That's what Daniel was talking about when he said, those who do wickedly against the covenant, that was the Hellenistic compromisers, he shall corrupt with flattery. But the people who know their God shall be strong and carry out great exploits. We'll talk about that in a moment.

But he says in Daniel 11, 33, and those of the people who understand shall instruct many, yet for many days they shall fall by sword and flame and by captivity and plundering. And when they fall, they shall be aided with a little help. Now, this little help that God raised up to help the godly Jews came in the form of the Maccabean revolt.

About this time, when paganism was being enforced upon the Jews, a certain officer was sent from Antiochus down to a village south of Jerusalem called Modian. This was in 167 BC. Modian was a few miles out of Jerusalem.

And there was an aged priest named Mattathias. And the officer from the Syrians set up an altar and commanded Mattathias the priest to offer a sacrifice to the pagan god. Mattathias refused, but another Jew stepped forward and said he would do it.

And Mattathias the priest was so outraged that he killed the Jew who did it, and then he killed the Syrian officer too. And knowing that this would, of course, bring reprisals from the Syrian army, Mattathias and his family fled into the mountains. He had four sons, or five, I forget the exact number.

Each one of them in turn, after Mattathias died, one of his sons took power, then another one, then another, and so forth. And there was a series of them. The most famous son of Mattathias who was involved in this revolt was Judas Maccabeus, which is where the expression Maccabean comes from.

The Maccabean revolt, it is sometimes called, because of Judas, the son of Mattathias. The same family is sometimes called the Hasmoneans by historians. That may not be of interest to you.

It never comes up in the New Testament. But they were sometimes called the Hasmoneans because of Hasmon, who was the great-grandfather of Mattathias. But Judas Maccabeus was so named for reasons unknown to us.

Maccabeus means the hammer. And some have said he was so named because of the shape of his head. Others feel that he was so named because of the striking and the attack of the horse.

Destructive blows that he brought down upon the Syrians. But when Mattathias and his sons fled into the hills, many other sympathetic Hasidim, godly Jews, fled with them. They were told, I mean, they had nothing better to do.

I mean, they were going to be put to death for obeying God anyway. They might as well put up a fight. And so they started this guerrilla army, as it were, first under the headship of Mattathias and then under his sons successively as each one was killed.

But although Mattathias and several of his sons in a row were killed as they successively led this revolt, within three years time, they succeeded. And they got the temple back under their control first. And it was exactly three years after... Oh, I didn't tell you how strange.

I didn't tell you exactly. You probably knew what the abomination of desolation was. I told you there was the enforcement of paganism by Antiochus.

But he actually sacrificed a pig on the altar to Zeus in the Holy Holies of the temple. And he enforced temple prostitution in the Jerusalem temple as well. And these things made the temple, of course, an abomination to the godly Jews.

And they did not worship there anymore until the Maccabean revolt succeeded in driving out the Syrian power. And then they had a feast of rededication where they rededicated the temple in December and Hanukkah, which the Jews still celebrate around the same time Christians celebrate Christmas. Hanukkah is the feast of dedication, which was established by the Maccabeans to celebrate their regaining control of the temple.

This feast is mentioned only once in the Bible, and that's in John chapter 10, where it is referred to as the feast of dedication. Jesus went to Jerusalem once during the feast of dedication. That is what we call Hanukkah today.

Of course, still celebrated the Maccabean victory. And after the temple was rededicated, there was still further fighting between the Maccabeans and the Syrians until they gained total Jewish independence from the Syrian power in 142 B.C. And then for less than 100 years, there was Jewish independence. I guess it was just a little over 100 years, come to think of it.

It was from 142 to 37 B.C. Well, even then it wasn't entirely independent. That was the period of what's called Hasmonean rule, because the Maccabeans were also called the Hasmoneans. And at that time, for a brief period of time, the political power shifted to the priesthood since Mattathias and his family were priests.

And since they were now the deliverers and heroes, sort of like the judges of the Old Testament times, like Gideon and so forth, they became the natural leaders of the nation. And there was all kinds of bad stuff going on with them. They assassinated each other to get the power to be king.

Some of them declared themselves kings, others did not. You know, one of them was assassinated by his own son-in-law and so forth and taken out of power. It was just really an ugly period of time.

It was a period of Jewish independence, but not a time of Jewish peace at all. Just it was a great time of instability during the Hasmonean rule from 142 to 37 B.C. But even during that time, the Romans came to power in the world and took the region over. They allowed Hasmonean kings to rule until 37 B.C., but around 63 B.C., the Romans conquered Jerusalem or conquered the region of Palestine and brought it under the province of Syria.

But that was now under Roman rule, not Seleucid rule. Pompeii, of course, was the conquering general that took it over. So in 63 B.C., the Jewish people in Palestine came under Roman rule.

They had thus been under Babylonian and then Persian and then Greek and then Egyptian and then Syrian rule. And now they were under Roman rule. And they were in that condition, of course, when Jesus came.

They were still under Roman rule. Now, as I said, the Romans did allow the Jews to maintain their own Hasmonean kings for a while, although they were brought under tribute to Rome. They were still allowed to elect or somehow obtain their own leaders from among their own ranks.

But that changed because probably largely because of the instability within the Jewish leadership there and the frequent assassinations and power struggles. The Romans appointed Herod, known later as Herod the Great, to be the king of the Jews in 40 B.C. But the Jews did not want Herod to be their king, and they actually waged war against him. Herod had to actually wage a war for three years with his own subjects in order to come to Jerusalem and to take power there.

So though Herod was appointed in the year 40 B.C., it wasn't until 37 B.C. that he actually conquered his subjects and was able to take power there. And that is, of course, when the rabbis bemoaned the fact that the scepter had now departed from Judah because Herod was half Edomite. He had some Jewish blood in him, but he was half Edomite.

And the Edomites were, of course, descended from Esau. They were the long-term enemies of Israel. They remained enemies of Israel even after that time.

But the Jews now winced under the rule of an Edomite or an Idumean king appointed by the Romans. And this, of course, only solidified the rule of the Romans over the Jewish people. Now, Herod the Great was a colorful character, mostly blood red.

He was a very paranoid and jealous of his power kind of a guy. He had, like most kings, a number of wives. He killed two of them because he thought they were plotting against him to take his throne.

He also killed three of his own sons for the same reason. In fact, Caesar Augustus once made this statement about Herod. He said, it's safer to be one of Herod's pigs than one of Herod's sons.

This represented a play on words, I believe, in the Latin. The word son and the word pig are similar words in their sound. I don't know Latin, so I can't verify that this is what I've read before.

And therefore, it was a play on words, two words that sounded a lot the same, son and pig. It's safer to be a pig than a son of Herod. And the reason for that is that because of Herod's nominal Judaism, half Judaism, he wouldn't eat a pig, but he would kill his own sons.

And so that was the irony associated with him. We know very little about his character from the Bible. The only story about Herod the Great we have in the Bible is where he issued the destruction of the infants in Bethlehem to try to get rid of Jesus.

And while that is not recorded elsewhere in history, it is very agreeable with what is known about Herod from history. Herod was a man who killed anyone who looked like a rival to the throne, including his own sons and wives and anybody. In fact, he killed, as I recall, one of his sons who was in fact plotting for his throne four days before his death.

That is before the father's death. He killed his own son four days before his own death because he didn't want to surrender his throne to him. And the man must have been a very unhappy man.

Not well loved by the Jews, I might say. They resisted him all the time. They resented his presence all the time.

And he was hated. In order to try to win the favor of the Jews, he poured a tremendous amount of money and years of work into redesigning, not redesigning, but what should I say, renewing the temple. The temple had been rebuilt after the Babylonian captivity by Zerubbabel and his companions, but they never had a budget like Solomon had.

Solomon ruled during the richest time in Israel's history. And so when he built the first temple, he spared no expense. And so the Temple of Solomon was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

But the temple that was rebuilt with the smaller budget by Zerubbabel and his companions was never really that great. And so Herod spent decades and a great deal of money embellishing that temple of Zerubbabel. And it did become one of the marvels of the world.

He really did a great deal for it. He was, as a politician and as a ruler, I mean, if you take morality out of the picture and spirituality out of the picture, he was not really that bad a ruler. I mean, he was a tyrant, but everyone was in those days.

But he was a pretty sharp ruler in many respects. He just had his little areas of craziness. And like many rulers do, it is reported of him from secular history that when he knew he was dying, and he died of intestinal cancer, when he knew he was dying, he also knew no one would be mourning his death.

No one would mourn for him. And so he ordered that a thousand of the chief citizens of Jerusalem should be arrested and kept incarcerated until he died. And upon his death, he ordered his servants to kill those thousand people so that there would be mourning throughout the land on the day of his death.

Even his servants, however, didn't love him. And so after he died, they released the prisoners and didn't kill them. But the character of Herod is very agreeable in history with that which is recorded in Scripture, though we have very little.

Herod died in the year 4 B.C. Now, since Jesus was born when Herod was still alive, it means, of course, Jesus was born sometime prior to 4 B.C. We don't know exactly what year. All we know is that Jesus... Well, let's put it this way. When Herod ordered the destruction of the infants in Bethlehem, he ordered that it be all children, all male children under two years old.

It says he determined this age based upon the information he had received from the wise men. This is in Matthew chapter 2, that he inquired of the wise men when the star had appeared and he got information from them. And based on that information, he ordered the destruction of infants under two years old.

From this, it may be deduced that Jesus was perhaps close to two years old. If the star appeared when he was born and it had been about two years, Jesus was very possibly about two years old when Herod ordered the destruction of the infants. Because of that threatened destruction, an angel of the Lord commanded Joseph and Mary to go to Egypt to escape this.

And they did go there and they remained there until Herod's death in 4 B.C. So how long they were there, we're never told. But one would have the impression it wasn't very many years. And Jesus couldn't have been born very much before 4 B.C. simply because he is said to have been about 30 years old when he began his ministry.

Luke chapter 3 tells us that when Jesus began his ministry, he was about 30 years old. I think it's Luke 3 23. Now, the year that Jesus began his ministry is said to be the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar.

Luke tells us that also the 15th year of Tiberius is the year 27 A.D. All right. Now, if Jesus was about 30 years old in the year 27 A.D., then he would have if he was exactly 30 years old at that time, he would have been born in the year three or four B.C. But it would seem clear that he was born a little before that. At least he was not exactly 30 when he began his ministry.

He might have been 31 or 32, maybe 33, even who knows. But he was about 30 and that's all we're told. So Jesus was born sometime, but not very much time before four B.C. when Herod died.

But when Herod died, that wasn't the end of Israel's problems with the Herods. There remained Herods. Some of Herod's sons unfortunately survived.

He didn't kill them all. And so when he died, the emperor divided up, Caesar Augustus, divided up Herod's domain among three of his sons. Archelaus, who is also called Herod Archelaus, a son of Herod the Great, ruled over Judea, Samaria, and Idumea.

But he only ruled over there from four B.C. till six A.D. He was removed because of mismanagement by the emperor at that time. And at that time, that same region came under Roman governors. Pontius Pilate was the fifth of those Roman governors or procurators, as they were called.

But Herod Archelaus ruled over Judea, where Herod had previously ruled, that portion, until six A.D. Herod Philip, another son of Herod's, reigned over the regions of northeast of Palestine. Therefore, he doesn't really come into the biblical story much. But Philip reigned in an area outside the region where Jesus lived.

Jesus only went one time, as far as we know, into the region governed by this Herod. And that was when he went to Caesarea Philippi, to the northeast of Palestine, with his disciples once. That was in the place where Herod Philip ruled, although Jesus, of course, had no contact with him.

Then Herod Antipas ruled over Galilee and Perea. Perea is the region east of the Jordan, and Galilee is, of course, the northern region of Palestine. Herod Antipas is the Herod that is usually referred to as Herod in the Gospels.

He is the Herod who killed John the Baptist and brought his head on a silver platter to his stepdaughter. He is the Herod who stole his brother's wife and was rebuked by John the Baptist. He's also the Herod that Jesus was tried before.

Remember, Pilate sent him to Herod, because Pilate didn't want to handle the situation himself. Herod wanted to see a miracle from Jesus, but Jesus did not humor him, didn't even speak to him. And so Herod sent him back to Pilate.

This is that Herod. He was the son of Herod the Great. He is known as Herod Antipas.

Jesus called him that fox once when he referred to him, not showing a great deal of respect to him, especially in view of the fact that he used the female word for fox, the word for female fox, vixen. Perhaps because the man was henpecked by Herodias' wife. He was certainly intimidated by her.

Anyway, these three sons of Herod took over, and of course, Archelaus was removed in 6 AD and replaced with a governor. And I mentioned Pilate was the fifth of the procurators, or the governors of Rome, the Roman governors of the region. Felix and Festus, who are in the Book of Acts, were the 11th and 12th men to sit in that position in Palestine.

Now, I'd like to talk about the Roman emperors, and then we'll be done here. We haven't talked about the Jewish parties in Palestine, which is significant. We'll talk about those eventually, perhaps at the beginning of our next session.

But there are several successive Roman emperors who ruled the whole empire surrounding the time of Christ. Caesar Augustus was reigning when Jesus was born. He reigned from 27 BC till 14 AD, at which time Tiberius became emperor.

And he was the emperor while Jesus ministered in Jesus' adult life. Tiberius was the emperor, and during the John the Baptist ministry. Caligula, from 37 to 41 AD, is not mentioned in the Bible, but he certainly, his reign falls within the period covered in the Book of Acts.

In the early days of the church, actually Caligula was a madman who ordered that an image of himself be placed in the Holy of Holies of the Jewish temple. However, Caligula was assassinated before this order could be carried out, and so it never happened. Had this happened, you might have had the events of 70 AD 40 years early, or 33 years early.

Because I'm sure the Jews would have revolted over this, and that would have caused the war that later broke out some 30 something years later. But Caligula was assassinated in 41 AD. He was replaced by Claudius.

Claudius is mentioned a couple times in the Bible, in the Book of Acts. He, we're told that Agabus predicted a famine, which actually took place in the reign of Claudius. And more importantly, we are told from the Roman historians of the period that Claudius expelled all the Jews from Rome because of conflicts over Jesus, over Christ.

Nero was the next emperor from 54 to 68 AD, and of course he was the first emperor to actually persecute Christians as such. And he did so not because they were Christians, but because he needed a scapegoat. He had burned Rome.

People were accusing him of doing so, and he needed someone to blame, so he blamed the Christians. And so the first great and horrible tribulation on Christians came under Nero's reign. He reigned from 54 to 68, or 69.

I think the dates are somewhat questionable. He committed suicide. What I've read elsewhere is he committed suicide in 69 AD.

The persecution began in 64 AD, and it continued largely until his death. Vespasian was the next emperor. Actually, there were three short-lived emperors, Otho, Galba, and Vitellus, who kind of assassinated each other at intervals of a few months.

And eventually Vespasian in 69 AD came to power, and it was he who sent his son Titus back to besiege and destroy Jerusalem. He reigned from 69 to 79 AD. His son Domitian reigned also from 81 to 96.

And I only mention him because some feel the Book of Revelation was written during Domitian's reign. I do not. I think it was written during Nero's reign, but there's two theories about that.

One theory is that the Book of Revelation was written during Nero's time, and that was the theory most popular in the previous century. This century, however, scholars tend to lean toward Domitian's reign, which is much later. There's reasons for both, and we'll study those some other time.

But I mention Domitian because there are many who believe that it was around 96 AD that John saw the vision on Patmos in the latter part of the reign of Domitian. Well, I had hoped to talk about the Jewish parties. We've gotten some background.

There's two things I failed to mention, which I'll mention briefly since we have about two minutes before this tape ends. Two things that really paved the way for the Gospel besides some of the things I mentioned was that when Alexander the Great conquered the empire, he made Greek the official language of the entire empire. So that by the time the apostles were dispatched from Jerusalem to preach throughout the empire, they only had to know one language, Greek.

Because everyone in the world, almost everyone except the barbarians, which were on the outskirts of the empire, everyone spoke Greek, which made it possible for the Gospel to be preached in all countries without the apostles learning a whole lot of different languages or needing to be empowered by the supernatural gift of tongues every time they spoke. Another factor that helped was that when the Romans came to power, they paved roads all over the empire. And we've never had to travel much without roads.

We take roads for granted. But before there were roads, travel was very difficult. But in order to be able to mobilize their armies all over the empire, the Romans paved roads from Rome to everywhere.

And that made it, of course, quite easy for not only armies but ideologies to travel throughout the empire, including the apostles who were able to freely move about from country to country because the Romans had paved the way, literally speaking. And so the Greek language introduced by Alexander and the roads paved by the Romans were among the things that also helped to make the times of Christ particularly opportune as a time for the Gospel to begin to be preached in the world. Next time, I'm going to talk to you about the Jewish parties that are found in the Bible because they did have differences and we need to know something about them.

I also want to talk to you about the sources of our information about Christ outside the Bible, the extra-biblical sources, as well as we want to talk a little bit about the Gospels as sources. We'll come back to that next time.