Jewish and Pagan Records

Introduction to the Life of Christ — Steve Gregg

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Jewish and Pagan Records

Introduction to the Life of ChristSteve Gregg

Steve Gregg explores the historical records of Jewish and pagan sources to shed light on the parties and dynamics in ancient Palestine during Jesus' time. He discusses the religious and political factions within Judaism, such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians, as well as the role of Roman governance and Jewish revolts. Gregg addresses the discrepancies between different historical accounts and dissects claims regarding Jesus' existence and the miracles attributed to him. Through an examination of ancient texts, Gregg seeks to provide a solid foundation for understanding the historical context in which Christianity emerged.

Transcript

I'd like you to look at the final page of the handout I gave you yesterday. And then I've also given you another handout today that we'll be taking a look at. We don't have very many more of these types of handouts that we're going to be going through.

These are just introductory matters. Before we get into the actual gospel accounts of the life of Jesus, we want to talk about a few things of importance. Things that some of you may not have ever wondered about, but which thinking people often do, and we don't want to leave it undone.

Now, I didn't say thinking people always wonder about those things. And therefore, if you never wondered about them, it doesn't exclude you from the class of thinking people. But, the more you think about the Bible, the more likely it is that you're going to have questions about some of these issues.

Let's put it that way. At the bottom of page two of the handout that I gave you yesterday, we have a section describing the Jewish parties in Palestine. Of course, Palestine is another word for the land of Israel.

Most Jews don't appreciate the term Palestine when used of that land, because Palestine is actually a word that's derived from the word Philistine. And the land took its name from the presence of the Philistines there in the times prior to David. And of course, when Joshua and the people of Israel came into the land, the Jews always called it their own.

They called it Israel. But it has been known by many names. This geographical region, of course, is the area where Jesus conducted almost his entire ministry.

He did a little ministry near the end, outside of Palestine, east of the Jordan, in a place called Perea. He also made an excursion or two to the other side of the Sea of Galilee and to the north and east of Palestine, but did not spend much of his time in those places. He really largely worked within the confines of the Jewish nation.

And so to know something about the politics and the social structures of that nation is useful in understanding why things happened the way they did in some cases in Jesus' life. Now, most of the Jews at the time when Jesus came did not live in their homeland. As we saw back in 586 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar had deported most of the Jews, almost all of them really, with the exception of a few very poor farmers, from the land of Israel and taken them into Babylon.

Some years later, some of them returned, but never most of them. Most of them had settled in by the time that they were free to return to Israel. They had settled into comfortable lifestyles, had homes and extended families and careers in Babylon or in the regions where they had been deported to, and they just weren't eager to make a long trip to resettle in Israel.

They were comfortable enough as they were. So it never happened that the majority of the Jews returned to Israel. And in Jesus' day, only about half a million Jews probably lived in Palestine.

This is based on largely what Josephus tells us. There were very possibly as many as three million Jews the world over at that time, which shows that only about one-sixth of them perhaps lived in Palestine. The rest were part of what was called the diaspora, which is the word that means the dispersion.

And sometimes we'll find references in the Gospels to the diaspora, or of course depending on which translation you're using, the word diaspora probably won't be used, it'll be the translation of it, the dispersion, the Jews of the dispersion. And this refers to Jews that didn't live in their homeland, although they did by law have to make pilgrimages back to Israel. And unless they lived extremely far away, they were required three times a year to come to Jerusalem for certain festivals.

And there they would celebrate at the temple, which was the center of Jewish life in Palestine. Jesus actually did a bit of teaching at the temple, usually at festivals. The temple was not Jesus' regular hunt, although the first recorded words of Jesus in his life took place at the temple when his parents had inadvertently left him at one of the feasts, and they had left for home and had neglected to see whether he was with them.

And when they went back and found him in the temple, they were somewhat ruffled by the whole experience of wondering whether he was safe, where he'd been, and they found him teaching or talking in the temple to the teachers there. And he said, why is it that you had to seek for me? Didn't you know that I must be about my father's business? And so the father's business involved Jesus in discussing things at the temple, because the temple, as Jesus later said, was my father's house. He complained that it was used for purposes that were not honoring to his father.

At a later time in his life. But the temple was where all the Jews had to come from time to time. Of course, those that lived in Jerusalem, which was the Jewish capital, had the temple right there in their neighborhood, and perhaps worshipped there with some frequency.

But the Jews who did not live in Jerusalem or nearby still had to come from time to time for the festivals. And it was in Jerusalem that Jesus found the largest crowds to preach to, probably. Although we do find him preaching to crowds of upwards of 5,000 people, even in Galilee, in his own region, probably the crowds were even larger than that in the temple area during the festival times, when pilgrims from all over the country were there.

In fact, we know that on the day of Pentecost, it was because of the festival of Pentecost that Jerusalem was clogged with people, and Peter preaching got 3,000 converts out of the crowd. That probably was not the majority of the listeners, but it must have been many, many thousands of people there. Jesus, however, spent most of his time outside of Jerusalem.

He did most of his ministry in the northern part of the country, which was Galilee. And in Galilee, there were actually more Gentiles than Jews. Although Galilee was technically part of Israel, it was one of the three districts into which the nation of Israel was divided.

Of course, Judea was the southern end and contained the capital of the country, Jerusalem. Then at the northern end was Galilee, the area that Jesus grew up in and conducted most of his public ministry in. And in between those two was a zone referred to as Samaria.

Together, Samaria and Galilee, the two northern districts of the country, had formerly been the northern kingdom of Israel when the kingdom divided back in the days after Solomon. In the days of Solomon's son, Rehoboam, the kingdom divided into a northern and southern kingdom. The southern kingdom was comprised only of the tribe of Judah and Benjamin.

And that region that had been the historic region of Judah was called Judea in the days of Jesus. The northern kingdom, comprised of the other ten tribes of Israel back in the days of Rehoboam, became in later times what was known in Jesus' day as Samaria and Galilee. However, Samaria was populated by people who were not careful in the maintenance of the integrity of their Jewish bloodline.

The Samaritans many centuries back had been intermarried with Gentiles. This was due to the fact that in 722 BC, the Assyrians had conquered that region, had deported many of the Jewish people from that region, and had brought in many Gentiles from other regions to repopulate the area. And the Jews that did remain in the area tended to marry among the Gentiles that were there.

And therefore, in Jesus' day, the inhabitants of that region were long-time degenerate in their bloodlines. For many generations, there had not been pure Jewish blood between the families there. And for that reason, they were viewed as sort of a half-breed race, and pretty much despised by those Jews that regarded their own pedigree to be more pure.

And in fact, the Samaritans were so much despised that the Jews of Galilee, when traveling to Judea, although the most direct route would be through Samaria, they tended to leave the country rather than go through Samaria. They'd cross over the eastern boundary of the country, which is the Jordan River, and travel along parallel to the country until they'd passed the region of Samaria, then they'd cross back into Judea, and vice versa, because they did not prefer to set foot on Samaritan soil. Jesus, of course, broke that mold a few times, went through Samaria deliberately, didn't seem to have any of that kind of prejudice that the Jews generally had.

But in Galilee, even though it was not a place where there was a half-breed, part-Jew, part-Gentile race, yet it was a region that had many Gentiles living in it. Galilee was sometimes called Galilee of the Gentiles because it was largely Gentile in population, and the Jews were fewer in number than the Gentiles there. Likewise, there were ten cities outside of Israel that were, for the most part, places that the Jews would call their own, but they also had more Gentiles in them than Jews.

These ten cities were called the Decapolis, which just means ten cities. And Jesus did draw some people from the Decapolis to hear his teaching we read in the Scriptures. If you wonder what the Decapolis is, these are ten cities that were outside the land of Israel, on the other side of Jordan, that were nonetheless considered to be in the province of the Jews.

But there were even more Gentiles there than Jews. The Jews, for the most part, did not belong to parties. There were some parties among the Jews, but the average Jewish person did not belong to any of the leading parties.

The average Jew in Jesus' day was what they called one of the people of the land. The expression, the people of the land, was the way that most of the Jewish citizenry, who were what we would call peasants today, were. They were farmers, farming their ancestral properties that they'd inherited from their fathers, who'd inherited them from their grandfathers, who'd inherited them from previous ancestors.

And many times just eking out a meager existence. For the most part, not very wealthy, but subsistence or even above in their produce. And therefore, they had some money to give to the temple, which they were supposed to give a tenth of it.

And there were a few that were richer, but those tended to be parts of the ruling classes. And those in ruling classes tended to belong to one or another party. The average person that Jesus appealed to in great numbers were just the peasants of the land, the people of the land.

But the people that Jesus conflicted with the most were actually the ruling class Jews who belonged to one or another party. And we'd like to examine just briefly what those parties were, because we do encounter them in the Bible. And if you don't know something about what they represented, you'll be at a loss to know why Jesus spoke some of the things he said to them.

Just as if you were trying to do business in the United States and didn't know what a Republican or a Democrat stood for. Of course, you could do business here, but you wouldn't understand an awful lot of what's in the news. And so to understand the Gospels, we need to understand something about those parties that interacted with Jesus, usually hostily.

As we pointed out yesterday, the entire land of Israel was under Roman dominion in those days. And the northern district of Galilee in Jesus' time was under a king, a Herod, Herod Antipas, who was the son of Herod the Great, who had been ruling the entire country when Jesus was born. He was now dead.

His son, Herod Antipas, now only ruled the northern part of Galilee and other regions up that way. But the southern part, Judea, was ruled over by Roman governors. Herod's son, Archelaus, had been deposed and replaced by Roman procurators, as they were called, in 6 AD.

And these governors were not well liked by the Jews, but they did give the Jews a substantial amount of self-rule. The Jews had been an unruly people under many different larger governments. We know that they were under Egyptians for a while, although we don't have any reason to believe they were particularly unruly in the days of Egypt before they became a nation themselves.

And then they were taken into Babylon, and then returned from Babylon, and were under the Persians, and then later under the Greeks, and then later under the Syrians, and so forth, and then the Romans. The Jews had many times, when they showed themselves to be fiercely independent, unwilling to acknowledge the legitimacy of foreign yoke upon their nation, there would be many revolts that had to be suppressed by the ruling nation that was over them. And they were not an easy people to govern.

And by the time of Jesus, that although there had been even some revolts before Jesus began his ministry, in 6 AD there was actually the first major revolt against the Romans after Herod's death, and that was the beginning of what is called the Zealot Party. We'll have something to say about them in a moment. But the Jews revolted from time to time, or groups of them did, and they were a hard people to manage.

And to avoid unnecessary trouble with the Jews, the Romans had given them a fair amount of self-rule. They allowed them to have a, as it were, a supreme court of their own, which was called the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin was made up largely of people of the Sadducean party, and it was governed by people of the priesthood.

There were some Pharisees in the Sanhedrin too. These were like political or religious parties. But the Sanhedrin was the ruling body in Jerusalem and over Judea.

And they could settle most legal matters themselves. They didn't have to go to the Romans very often to settle matters where they had to make a ruling. The only difference, or the only restriction that was a major restriction that the Jews chafed under, under the Romans, was that the Romans did not allow the Jews to execute capital offenders.

The Jews could not, for example, take a person who had committed murder or adultery or who had in other ways violated the Jewish law in a way as to warrant death. The Jews couldn't just kill him. The Sanhedrin, the supreme court of Israel, was not allowed to do that.

They had to get Roman approval, which is why Jesus had to be taken before Pilate. The Jews condemned him, the Sanhedrin condemned him on the night that he was betrayed. But they couldn't crucify him, and they couldn't put him to death without the approval of the Romans.

And the Sanhedrin really were, of course, upset that the Romans withheld that from them. But they had to work within the system. And therefore, they had to bring false charges against Jesus, the kind of charges that would alarm the Romans.

Interestingly, the Sanhedrin condemned Jesus in their own court for blasphemy. But knowing that that wouldn't concern the Romans at all, you know, why would they care about a Jew blaspheming the Jewish God? They had to come up with trumped-up false charges to try to get Pilate interested in the case. And therefore, they told Pilate that Jesus was an insurrectionist who was teaching things contrary to Caesar, that he was calling himself the King of the Jews, and that, of course, is contrary to Caesar, and trying to make Jesus look like a political problem, when in fact, they were just being hypocritical as usual.

They didn't care about his politics. They cared about his religious viewpoints and so forth. But Pilate got into the act and did allow them to have him crucified.

Now, there was one exception. The Romans did allow the Jews to execute criminals who violated the sanctuary of the temple, or the sanctity of the temple. There was a part of the temple called the Court of the Gentiles.

Beyond that point, no Gentile could come. There was even a sign posted there, according to Josephus, that said no Gentiles allowed beyond this point on pain of death. And, you know, if you go beyond this point and you're a Gentile, you do so at the risk of your life.

And the Romans apparently did give the Jews the right to kill people if they violated the sanctity of their temple. This is because the Jews were so emotionally attached to this issue. And that's no doubt why the Sanhedrin was able to stone Stephen to death without getting Pilate's approval, without getting the approval of the governor.

Although they weren't able to do the same to Jesus. They tried to get Jesus on charges of violating the temple. Do you remember that when the Sanhedrin hired false witnesses to bring charges against Jesus, the first witnesses they brought were hired to say that they heard him say he was going to destroy the temple and raise it in three days.

But the witnesses didn't agree with each other and the testimony broke down, so they had to take another attack. And finally the high priest said, well, are you the son of God? And he said, yes. And they said, oh, that's blasphemy.

That's good enough for us. But they couldn't kill him for blasphemy under Roman rule. Because they tried to get him on charges of blasphemy in the temple.

Stephen, you might recall, was put to death because he was charged with saying that Jesus would destroy the temple. And his sermon in Acts chapter 7 seems to agree that he was saying that the temple was of no value and that it never was God's plan in the first place for there to be a temple, only a tabernacle. And he made the people so mad they just charged at him and stoned him.

And they went out for that. And before the Romans, they would say, well, this fellow blasphemed the temple. And that would have been their loophole.

What about the woman caught in adultery? Were they going to stone her? Actually, they didn't have the right to stone her. The woman caught in adultery, they did not have the right to stone. And she probably was not in danger of being stoned on that occasion.

They brought that situation that Jesus would trap him, not to punish her. we should stone this woman. What do you say? Now, see, Jesus was on what we call the horns of a dilemma there.

Because if he said, well, yes, or if he said, don't stone her, they could accuse him of undermining Moses. And that would not go well for Jesus as far as popular opinion. If he was undermining Moses, the great hero and founder of the Jewish religion, that would be bad.

He would be accused of going against Moses. But if he said, yes, stone her, then he could be accused before the Romans of trying to incite the Jews to do something that was against the Roman law. See, so he was kind of on the horns of a dilemma.

Notice they didn't say, let's stone her. They said, Moses said we should stone her. What do you say? It was really trying to trap him in a legal dilemma.

And he managed it pretty nicely. He indicated that stoning her was the first thing to do. Yeah, go ahead, he says, but let him that is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her.

So, in effect, he got out of that problem. But yeah, that's a case in point. They could not have legally stoned her.

Now, they may have illegally killed people on some occasions in a riot setting. They sought to do that to Paul when he was on his final visit to Jerusalem before his imprisonment and being sent to Rome. But they did, they tried to kill him.

From the Fort Antonio, they came down and saw the commotion and pulled him away from them. And the Romans didn't even know what the problem was, but the Jews were about ready to kill Paul. But they were again doing it on the charges that he had brought a Gentile into the temple.

Whether he did or not, we're not told. He probably did not. But they accused him of bringing Tychicus, a Gentile, into the temple and that would have been, in their interpretation of the law, grounds for them to kill him and to make a lot of major legislative and judicial decisions among themselves.

And the Sanhedrin was the court that all the Jews basically had to fear, because they were the final court of appeals on matters. Now, in the Sanhedrin, and even outside the Sanhedrin, there were Jews of various parties. The most prominent party in the books of the Gospels is the Pharisaic party.

The Pharisees trace their origins back to the times of the Maccabees or even possibly before. But during the times of the Maccabees, the Hasidic Jews, the ones who stood for conservatism and stood against the Hellenization or the Greek culture coming into Israel, their party actually evolved into what later were known as the Pharisees. The name Pharisee means a separated one.

The Apostle Paul, prior to his conversion, was a Pharisee. Although in the book of Romans, now that he's saved, he said he's now separated unto the Gospel of God. He had formerly been a separated one, a Pharisee separated unto the law and the traditions of the elders.

But now in Romans 1, he says I'm separated unto the Gospel of God. He's a Pharisee for the Gospel, in other words, those are the opening verses of Romans 1. But the separated ones, the Pharisees, the Pharisephus, out of half a million Jews living in Palestine, only 6,000, a very small, small percentage were Pharisees. But they were regarded by the general populace as the most religious, the most uncompromised, the most righteous people in society.

And they regarded themselves that way too. Everyone else was a lesser breed without the law, you know. And the Pharisees were the law keepers, but not just the law.

They were the ones, more than any, who had confused the authority of the law of God with the authority of the elders, that is the rabbis whose opinions about the law have been passed down orally for centuries from the Babylonian captivity on, and whose opinions later became encoded in what we now know as the Talmud and the Midrash. And though these were not written yet, they were well-established customs of the rabbis and of the elders and it was on points of violation of these things that Jesus most often ran into problems with the Pharisees. Interestingly, many Pharisees got saved after the day of Pentecost, it would seem.

And even a few seemed to have gotten saved while Jesus was on the earth. Nicodemus would be an example of one. And we don't know how many others may have been attracted to Jesus, but for the most part, the Pharisee religion was the opposite of that of Jesus.

Jesus was very free, very liberated. The Pharisees, as Jesus said, they bound heavy burdens and grievous to be born and put them on men's backs, but they themselves would not lift a finger to relieve them or to lift those burdens from them. They were very, very stoutly disciplined in their lives to keep all the traditions of the elders and of the law, although Jesus indicated they were hypocrites.

In fact, that's the word he most often used them. In fact, his use of the word hypocrite of the Pharisees was probably the first time that the word really had a real negative meaning. You see, the word hypocrite in the Greek, is the word for an actor in a play, a vocation which maybe the Jews didn't look that highly on, but it wasn't the most scandalous thing to call an actor in a play.

It was an honest profession, but to call a religionist an actor in a play when he's not in any plays is to suggest that he's living his life as if it were a play and he's acting a role that isn't really him, just like an actor in a play does. And when you call somebody who is a religious leader a play actor, you're suggesting that he's trying to, you know, he's living in an unreal world like that of a drama where everything about his life is a disguise, an assumed identity, a false identity, and everything he does is simply a prop and the blocking that is required of him in that role. And from the time of Jesus on, when he called the Pharisees the hypocrites or the play actors, we have of course come to understand that in our culture to refer to one of the worst things you can say about a person in that way, but it's funny now that Christians are the ones who are called hypocrites by the world and the world doesn't realize to what degree they're indebted to Jesus for giving hypocrite that particular kind of usage of religious people.

As I said before, the Western culture has no idea the degree to which it is indebted to Jesus for its way of thinking and talking. Even those who are most opposed to Jesus inadvertently quote him or think like he did on some things that are not true. In Jesus' day, or actually a generation or so before Jesus' day, there were two leading rabbis among the Pharisees.

One was named Shammai and the other was Hillel. These, if I'm not mistaken, were two generations before Christ. They might have been just in the generation before his, I'm not all that clear on their actual time frame, but they were just prior to the coming of Christ by a generation or two.

They were the foundations of Phariseeism. They were the basic schools of Phariseic thought. The main difference between them was essentially that Hillel was a very liberal kind of a guy in many respects.

He interpreted very graciously and almost too graciously, too leniently, many of the laws. For example, on questions of what would be grounds for divorce or what would constitute a violation of the Sabbath or some of those kinds of things where the scriptures were unclear, Hillel would always take a very lenient view. He'd allow more to be done perhaps on the Sabbath than the other school would allow to be done.

He allowed people to divorce their wives for any cause, anything that bugged them about their wives. They could divorce and forth. Now, Shammai, the other leader of the school, was far more rigorous, far more, we'd say conservative, more like a fundamentalist, more legalistic really.

He would have said that divorce was only permitted on the grounds of adultery. And he would have, of course, interpreted all the law requirements more strictly than Hillel did. And there was the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai among the Pharisees.

Once Jesus was approached in Matthew 19 by Pharisees who asked him this question. They said, Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for every cause? And they were trying to get him to side for one side or the other of the Pharisees because there was a stricter and a less strict interpretation even among the Pharisees. When Jesus said that a man can't do this except for the cause of fornication, he agreed in this instance with Shammai against Hillel on the subject.

But of course he was against the Pharisees in many respects. But he did hold some of the same views of the Pharisees. And this is what got Jesus in trouble with the Pharisees.

The Sadducees were the opposing party to the Pharisees. And they not only rejected the oral traditions of the rabbis, but they also rejected much of the Old Testament scripture or at least something that Josephus said has been historically interpreted that way. It would appear that the Sadducean party only accepted the five books of Moses as scripture.

What was called the Torah, the law. And they didn't know exactly what their opinion was of the prophets and so forth. Because we don't know much about their party except what Josephus has told us and what we read in the Bible.

And there's very little in the Bible about them. But they were a party that did not believe, did not tend to believe in supernatural things. They didn't believe in angels.

They didn't believe in spirits. They didn't believe in the resurrection of the dead. Now the Pharisees believed in all those things and so did Jesus.

The Sadducees once approached Jesus, only once as far as we know, in his entire ministry. In the final week of his ministry he was approached by the Sadducees who tried to stumble him over his belief in the resurrection. Apparently the Pharisees and the Sadducees had ongoing debates among themselves about these things.

The Sadducees believed that the resurrection was a ridiculous doctrine. And of course the basic text of the Old Testament that would support the resurrection was that the Sadducees were concerned. They only accepted the five books of Moses.

And therefore the Pharisees believed in the resurrection because Daniel and Isaiah and others did mention it. But the Sadducees did not. And there was apparently some real hot debate over this.

The reason I say it was a hot debate it was very volatile. At a much later time the apostle Paul when standing before the Jewish court before the Sanhedrin later in his life he saw that part of the court was not in line with what it says. And he decided to instead of defend himself he decided to set the court into disarray.

So he said, brethren, I am here on trial because I believe in the traditional hope of our fathers that there will be a resurrection from the dead. And all of a sudden the Pharisees said this guy hasn't done anything wrong. This guy should be released because they agreed with him about the resurrection of the dead.

And the Sadducees, they said the Pharisees and the Sadducees began arguing with each other until the whole court was a mob scene. And Paul was just taken away for his own protection from the scene and had to stand trial another day. But apparently this question of the resurrection was that volatile that just by raising it in the courtroom would cause the jurors on one side the Sadducees and the jurors who are the Pharisees or not jurors but whatever they were legislators or whatever you call them jurists to be thrown into disarray by the very suggestion of the doctrine.

There was apparently one really good argument against the resurrection that the Sadducees had always stumped the Pharisees with. It would appear that the Pharisees had never been able to answer it. And the Sadducees hearing that Jesus believed in the resurrection approached him once and said, Master, there were seven brothers among us.

And the oldest of them died leaving no heir. Now according to the law of Moses which the Sadducees accepted as authoritative the next brother had to marry her. But he died without an heir and so the next brother had to marry her and so forth on down through all seven.

All seven had her and died childless. And finally she died. No surprise about that.

After having seven men in a row she probably couldn't take any more. But eventually they were all dead. And the story is probably not a true story.

But it's a case to show that in a case like this which could really happen the resurrection would be absurd. They said in the resurrection which of these husbands will have her since she had all seven of them. Now to the Jew for a man to have seven wives whether on earth or in the resurrection would not seem an absurdity.

But for a woman to have seven husbands was clearly an absurdity. And therefore they thought we've got him now that it would arise that seven brothers in a row dying childless would all have married in their lifetime one woman. And in fact the law would have required that she marry them all.

And yet in the resurrection if there were to be one this would present the awkward situation of five living seven living men and one living woman and all of them had only had her as a wife and would be claiming her. And Jesus said to them you do err and he said well the scriptures probably what he meant was that they weren't acknowledging all the scriptures of scripture. If they did they would not make this mistake.

And he answered the question directly and then he answered them in a way that must have really twisted the knife a little bit. His first answer was well none of them will have her in the resurrection because in the resurrection people don't marry and are not given in marriage and they're like the angels. So there's no problem with that there.

Sadducee is accepted. He said have you not read that when God appeared to Moses in Exodus that he said I am the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob men who were long dead at that time. And yet Jesus said but God's not the God of dead men but of living men which he didn't carry the argument further but the implication was how could God be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who were dead at the time that God identified himself like that to Moses.

How could he be the God of them if in fact God is known to be the God of living men not of dead men. The idea is that since God identified himself with men who were historically dead at a later time that they had an ongoing existence. And to the Jew an ongoing spiritual disembodied existence wasn't part of their picture.

It was understood that if someone was still alive somewhere they're going to eventually have to take on physical existence because the idea of separation of spirit from the body in eternity is a Greek idea not a Jewish idea. So the idea that God would still identify himself with men who had died and call himself their God in view of the fact that God is only the God of living men suggested that those men although they had died were living and therefore one would expect that they would someday rise. Anyway the argument worked well with Sadducees, with Jews and it says no one dared ask him any questions after that.

He put him to silence and where is that? It's in Matthew and in Mark and in Luke I believe. I think all three of those Gospels present that dialogue. I think you'd find it in Matthew 22.

Is it? No not 23. Oh 22, 23 thanks yeah. Matthew 22, 23 is when they approached him.

And then in the parallels in Mark and Luke. And the Sadducees took their name from Zadok who was the high priest they were a party that was probably almost entirely made up of priests and they were a smaller party than the Pharisees. But the Pharisees were far more popular and exercised influence disproportionate to their numbers.

Although the Sadducees were fewer in number than Pharisees they were wealthier because they were more willing to compromise with the Roman authorities. The Sadducees controlled the priesthood which means the high priest and many of the priests were Sadducees. So when Jesus stood trial before the Sanhedrin technically it was a Sadducean high priest that cross-examined him.

Though the court did have some Pharisees in it like Nicodemus and probably Joseph of Arimathea was a Pharisee also rather than a Sadducee. But we don't know much more about the Sadducees than that. The Sadducees obviously because they they worked together with the Romans.

They were more politically oriented than the Pharisees. The Pharisees were more religiously oriented. The Sadducees were viewed as compromisers collaborators with the enemy more like the Hellenizers of the pre-Maccabean period.

But these parties were very different from each other and very hostile to each other for the most part. And I don't think the average Jew really looked up to the Sadducees very much. They looked up to the Pharisees because they were religious and strict.

The Sadducees probably were seen largely as compromised. Now there's a group called the Herodians mentioned only a couple of times in the Bible in Mark 3 6 and 12 13. And.

The Herodians. All we know about them is that on one occasion the Herodians conspired with the Pharisees how they might put Jesus to death. That's in Mark 3 6 after Jesus embarrassed them in a particular synagogue service.

The Herodians and the Pharisees conspired together to put Jesus to death. Now no one knows very much about the Herodians. They're not mentioned outside the Bible and they're only mentioned here in the Bible.

And not much is said. It is assumed from the name Herodians that they were followers of or supporters of Herod. Just like Christians are supporters of and followers of Christ.

Herodians would be followers and supporters of Herod. Now there were Jews that were known to be in positions of positions under Herod and supportive of Herod. These were sometimes called noble men in the Bible.

One of the first miracles Jesus performed on his return to Galilee in the early stage of his ministry was the healing of a nobleman's son. This nobleman was almost certainly a courtier of Herod's court and a Jew. He would be probably a Herodian although he's not so called in the passage where he's called a nobleman.

Likewise there is another time when the Bible mentions a woman who was a follower of Jesus one of the ones who helped financially support Jesus and the disciples. She was said to be the wife of Chusa of Herod's household. Chusa we know nothing about except from what it says right there.

He was of Herod's household probably a household servant of Herod and probably would belong to the party called the Herodians. What's ironic is that we find the Herodians and the Pharisees joining together against Jesus in Mark chapter three to try to destroy him when in fact politically the Pharisees and the Herodians had very little in common. The Pharisees resented the Roman presence, resented Herod and the Herodians apparently supported him and it's likely that the Herodians and Pharisees had nothing to do with each other on ordinary days.

But when they had a common enemy that threatened them Jesus they were willing to work together. Apart from this we know very little about them. We just know that they existed and they're mentioned.

There's another group that's mentioned only in the most indirect way in the scriptures and that's the Zealots. This party was more radically opposed to the Roman rule than the Pharisees even more than the common people were. Although most of the common people were very I imagine secretly sympathetic to the Zealot party.

The Zealot party had been founded in 6 AD by a man named Judas of Galilee. He's mentioned one time in the scripture in Acts chapter 5 where Gamaliel is trying to calm down the Sanhedrin who are not quite sure how to punish appropriately the apostles who were causing such a stir. In Acts chapter 5 Gamaliel spoke up and said well you know there's been other movements like this before and they died under their own weight.

If we leave it alone maybe it will die and if we oppose it if it's of God it's going to survive anyway. Why don't we just let it be and see what happens. Let it fizzle out.

But he gave two examples. One of them was Judas of Galilee. He mentioned that he had led a band of insurgents against the Romans but that you know the leaders were Judas was killed by the Romans.

The other leaders of the Zealots were killed by the Romans. But in Jesus day there was still a very strong Zealot sympathy and there were still Zealots who made raids on Roman encampments and actually they were the guerrilla. They were like the Maccabeans of Jesus day.

The difference is they weren't successful as the Maccabeans were. The Maccabeans succeeded in driving out the Syrians but despite long resistance on the part of the Zealots they never did succeed in driving out the Romans. In fact the Romans stamped out that party in 73 AD at the stronghold of Masada which you may have heard or read something about.

After Jerusalem was destroyed there was still a group a community of Zealots up on this table rock mountain called Masada. They were surrounded by the Romans and being starved out. According to the reports they committed suicide rather than be captured by the Romans.

There are some who question whether they committed suicide or whether they were killed. No one survived to tell but the standard story is that they committed suicide rather than be delivered over to the Romans. That in the year 73 AD was the end of the Zealots.

The only reason we mention them here is because Jesus picked one of his twelve apostles from that party. Of course that was a man named Simon the Zealot. It shows Jesus' lack of concern for the way that his choices would impact on the way he was viewed by his enemies.

If he wanted to avoid scrutiny of the Romans it seems like he would have avoided bringing a known Zealot into his company because that would certainly make Jesus and his band of apostles on the suspect list of the Romans of insurrectionists. Although we don't find Jesus ever in any way showing any sympathy with the Zealot cause. Another group that I didn't put in your notes was not so much a party as a group of Jews who had sold out to the Romans, just the opposite of the Zealots.

Not only were tolerant of the Romans but were working right with them and those were the Publicans. The word Publican just means a tax collector but the taxes or the tribute that was collected was collected from Jewish people to give to their Roman oppressors or their Roman overlords. The Jews for the most part resented Roman taxation and of course the foundation of the Zealot party was that Judas of Galilee taught that it was unlawful for a Jew to pay taxes to Caesar because Judas taught and the Zealots believed that only God was the rightful ruler of the people of Israel and therefore for them to pay tribute to any earthly ruler was to acknowledge some other king other than God and was a blasphemy.

So there were no parties more hostile to each other in Israel than Zealots and Publicans because the Zealots believed it was total treason against God and country for a Jew to pay taxes to Caesar. They were the tax evaders, the tax resistors of the day. But the Publicans were Jews who had actually gone over and not only approved of it but actually collected the taxes for the Romans and they were despised by almost everybody.

There are several Publicans of importance in the Gospels. Of course Zacchaeus was a Publican. There was a Publican that Jesus contrasts with the Pharisee who prayed in the temple and Jesus approved of the Publican's prayer but not the Pharisee's prayer.

And most of the apostles, Matthew was a Publican prior to his call and not only an apostle but a writer of scripture for us. But the interesting thing is that Jesus would call someone from the Zealot party and someone from the life of Publican profession and put them together on one leadership team because as far as political views are concerned they couldn't have been at further polls from each other. It would be like taking a white supremist from the Aryan Nations party and putting him on your team with a leader of the Black Panthers.

And say, now I want you guys to lead the church in unity. It shows how really to be a Christian you had to pretty much lay down all your political preferences and they had to be subsumed under the greater purpose of the kingdom of God. Anyway, one other group of Jews that are not mentioned in the Bible but were contemporary with Jesus and some have felt there was contact between Jesus and these people and also between John the Baptist and these people are the Essenes.

The Essenes were a group of highly legalistic Jews who withdrew from society altogether and formed their own communities down in the desert down around the Dead Sea. And they had all elaborate traditions of washings. They bathed themselves several times a day.

They believed that all contact with city life was defiling and they felt that even the Pharisees were too compromised. It was apparently the Essenes or some community like theirs that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Qumran community produced the Dead Sea Scrolls and they are believed to have been Essenes.

There must have been a number of communities of the Essenes. It's interesting in the writings of the Essenes there was reference to the great teacher who was never named but some people have tried and I think wrongly to try to associate this great teacher either with John the Baptist or Jesus and have suggested that John had connections with the Essenes. After all, didn't he live down in the wilderness of Judea most of the years of his life before he came out into the public? And they believe he was possibly in Essene.

Also the fact that he advocated water baptism and the Essenes were big time into washing and re-washing and re-washing. However, of course, John's baptism had nothing to do with the Essene washings because they did it many times a day. John's baptism was presumably a once in a lifetime kind of a deal.

So the attempt to connect John the Baptist with the Essene community, I think, are a fool's errand. But also, even more so, to try to connect Jesus to the Essenes. Obviously there's about 18 years or more of Jesus' life that are not recorded for us from the time he was 12 until he was 30 and some have felt that Jesus traveled a bit during those years.

Some think he traveled widely to Egypt and to Nepal and to India and places like that and learned all kinds of magic. That's, of course, the New Age view. Another view amenable to the New Age is that he spent some time with the Essenes and was the great teacher that they spoke about.

But that is unlikely to be the case, very unlikely, because Jesus was about as opposite of the Essenes in his thinking as any Jew could be. He was more liberated than many, certainly more liberated than the Essenes or the Pharisees, probably more liberated than any of the parties as far as his ideas of religion. He believed that all that mattered was to love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbors as yourself and everything else can take care of itself.

So Jesus was not really in the Essene camp at all and probably never had contact with them. And John the Baptist probably never had contact with them either. But since they were contemporary with Jesus and John, many have felt that perhaps there was some connection there.

Now, if you'll turn to this handout, by the way, are there any questions about what we've just been talking about? Is everything clear? Okay. If you'll look at the handout I've just given you today, we're going to talk about the sources of our information about Jesus. Now, something I want to make very clear, and it's probably clear to you already, but it's certainly not clear to everybody.

And so I need to say this. Christianity is not a system of religion. It is a belief in and a relationship to a person.

Therefore, if Jesus is a fictional character, then Christianity cannot have any validity whatsoever. If Jesus is a legendary character, if there never was a Jesus or if the Jesus that did exist was very different than the Jesus that the Christians believe in, then Christianity cannot be valid. And this is the case no matter how much you may like the teachings of Christianity.

You might say, well, I don't care if there was ever a Jesus, but the Sermon on the Mount, that's the greatest sermon ever preached. I don't know who made it up, but it's a great one. That's my religion.

Well, if that's your religion, that's not Christianity. Christianity is not religious ideas. Christianity is a person, Jesus Christ.

And therefore, Christianity, unlike any other major world religion, apart from Judaism, which is like Christianity in this respect, is not, I mean, is rooted in history. I've told you this before in a previous lecture on another subject. But Christianity has its roots in historical events.

If those historical events are true, then Christianity is true no matter what we think about the teachings of Christianity as far as its ethics or or its theology or whatever, regardless of how much we may like or dislike it, it's true if the historical events are true. Because the claim of Christianity, the basic gospel message of Christianity is that Jesus lived, died, and rose again. That's it.

And that he died for our sins, of course. Now, if that is not historically true, but Christianity nonetheless embodies many wonderful ideas, that is not enough reason to support Christianity as a religion. Those ideas are just something, someone made up, if they're not Christ's.

In fact, they're made up by someone who lied because they said that Jesus taught them. We need to know whether Jesus was really a historical character. Now, most of us have a relationship with Jesus that is sensate enough that we are aware of his existence, even apart from the records.

That is, we've had conversations with him. We've talked to him. He's answered our prayers.

We've sensed his presence on many occasions. But that's still not a good enough basis for being a Christian because Mormons feel things too. And Hindus sometimes feel things too.

And if feelings are to be trusted as the basis of the legitimacy of religion, then all these religions must have legitimacy. But, of course, truth is an objective thing. It's not validated by what we feel about it at any given time.

And even things that we think we feel may be misinterpreted by us. You might feel good vibes and say, oh, I feel the presence of Jesus. But if Jesus was not a historical character, then what you feel isn't the presence of Jesus.

You're just interpreting that way. The only way you can know if Christianity is valid is to know whether the historical Jesus is, in fact, historical. Whether the things that you believe about Jesus really happened or didn't.

And therefore, the task of determining whether you should be a Christian or not is a historical inquiry. That's something that many people do not realize or don't acknowledge. The decision of whether to be a Christian or not is almost entirely a historical inquiry.

Do I want to believe in Jesus? Well, how do I decide that? Well, by the question of whether the things that are said about him are true or not. Did he die? Did he rise from the dead? Did he even really exist? There are some who deny that he did. Not very many.

But some very hardcore people who've done no homework or ignore the facts actually say Jesus never existed. There are no doubt times, hopefully few and fleeting, when almost every Christian at some time or another thinks, I wonder if Jesus really did live. I wonder if I'm just kind of on to some kind of a fantasy.

I wonder if what I've experienced is a psychological phenomenon or a sociological phenomenon that I've been swept up into. I wonder if there really was a Jesus. Or if there really was, if he was really like the Jesus in the Gospels.

Or was he just some ordinary guy that later got embellished in the retelling of his story to be made out to be a god. Now, like I said, I hope that such thoughts, if they come to you at all, are few and fleeting. But they do come from time to time.

And at times like that, it's important that you know something, something solid about the historicity of the Gospels. Of course, the Gospels are the principal source of information for us about Jesus. And we can thank God that someone didn't choose to sit down and write those.

Because without the Gospels, we'd have slim pickings as far as our inquiries as to what Jesus said or did or what he represented. Fortunately, God has providentially provided the Gospels for us. Some would reject the Gospels as historical records, however, just on the basis that they were written by Christians and that Christians can't be expected to tell the truth, certainly.

Somehow I question that very presupposition. Why is it that Christians can't be expected to tell the truth? You see, many people would say the Gospels were written much later than what they appear to be. That they were really written in maybe the second century or so after the church had developed an elaborate set of teachings about Jesus that really bore little resemblance to history.

And that Jesus had just been maybe a peasant revolutionary or an insightful teacher or something very different than what the Gospels make him out to be. But the Gospels still preserve a little bit of the true Jesus. But that what we have there largely in the claims that he was the son of God, that he forgave sins and that he came down from heaven and those things.

Those all represent later embellishments on the idea, inventions of the church later on as they wish to deify their hero. Now, those who suggest such things simply have no evidence whatsoever to confirm it. They're motivated by a desire, of course, to discredit Christianity.

Though they ignore the fact that this is not the tendency in religions. It is not the tendency in religions to deify the hero. The gods of the Greeks and the Romans, for example, are not likely to be deifications of any real historical characters that lived.

If so, their historical identities have totally vanished from the legends and they're not believed to have been earthly people at all. Islam has been around only a few centuries less than Christianity and there's been no attempt whatsoever made by the Muslims to deify Mohammed as a god. And the reason for that is that Muslims believe in one god.

And to deify Mohammed would be very much against the grain of their whole religious thinking. Likewise, the Jews' religion has been around for centuries longer than Islam or Christianity and their great hero and founder, Abraham, or maybe they'd want to pick Moses as the principal founder of their nation, never was deified. They've never suggested, there's never been Jewish traditions that developed that Abraham was a god or that Moses was a god.

In other words, we don't see this trend in the development of religions. So on what basis would one postulate that such a thing happened in Christianity, which also, like Islam and like Judaism, was a monotheistic religion, a religion that is very jealous over the idea that there's only one god. It is almost inconceivable that it could happen the way that the critics sometimes say, that the Christians found this Jewish teacher and within a century of his time were already claiming that he claimed to be god.

For one thing, the claim that Jesus made to be god only complicates things for Christianity. It requires that we come up with some kind of a very difficult Trinitarian concept. You don't find any elaboration of a Trinitarian concept in the Old Testament.

And only the suggestion that Jesus is god in any sense calls into mind this need to reconcile how Jesus could be the son of god and be god. How could the father be god and the son be god at the same time? We know that this goes right against the grain of Jewish thinking and Greek thinking. So it's hard to know whose thinking it would agree with.

And how such thinking could develop artificially if it was a man-made religion. When C.S. Lewis wrote Beyond Personality, which is a portion of the book Mere Christianity, he tried to explain the Trinity. Some may or may not be satisfied with his explanation, but he admitted the Trinity doctrine is a hard doctrine.

He said, if we were making this up, we'd make it a lot easier. And that is obviously the case. There's nothing that has been more of an embarrassment or frustration to Christian theologians throughout the years than the attempt to reconcile Jesus' claims to be god with the fact that he claimed that he was the son of god and that god was his father.

Now, the only explanation is that Jesus really did make these claims because it's hard to imagine how anyone would have ever put such difficult claims into his mouth. Why Christianity would bring upon itself the logical dilemma of trying to explain father and son both being god but not being each other. It's obvious that there is neither a trend that is observed in religions to so embellish the stories of their leaders as to make them gods, especially monotheistic religions like Christianity.

Furthermore, the particular embellishment that would be suggested here would be one that brings theological complexity and confusion into the church and would not be one that, it's one that Christians often wish wasn't there. I would really find it much easier to be a Bible teacher if Jesus had never claimed to be god. But he did, and I have to welcome what he said at face value.

I just don't know how to explain it all. But religious systems tend to simplify, not complexify, their doctrines as they go along, it seems to me. I mean, look at Jehovah's Witnesses as a spin-off of Christianity.

What they've sought to do is to simplify things, get rid of this complex doctrine of the Trinity, get rid of the problem of an eternal hell, get rid of all these different problems, and make it simple. That's, of course, I think human nature's desire, is to make their religious concepts simple, not complex. So, I totally reject, as first of all, devoid of any support, evidentially, and also unreasonable in view of human nature or the history of religions or whatever, it is crazy, in my opinion, to try to support the notion that the Gospels have put words into Jesus' mouth, that they've made him out to make claims for himself that he never really made, and to try to restructure the whole picture.

In fact, there's been books like the Passover Plot, that are reasonably recent, vintage, back in the 60s, I guess it was, or 70s, the Passover Plot was issued for publication, and it was written by a Jewish guy who claimed that Jesus didn't really die on the cross. He swooned, he was mistaken for dead, he was put into the tomb. In the tomb he woke up, somehow he got out of the tomb, and he was half-dead, of course, having lost so much blood, and he stumbled around and a couple of his disciples accidentally ran into him and said, wow, he's risen from the dead, and they ran off to tell others.

In the meantime, this half-dead Jesus fell into another grave somewhere else and died, and they never found his body, and therefore, that explains the empty tomb, that explains the story of the resurrection, and so forth. The only problem with this theory is the absence, 100% absence, of any evidence. It's a theory merely, and the problem here is that the author of that theory had nothing more to go on than the four Gospels.

He doesn't have any, you know, he hasn't discovered some new records of the life of Christ that have authenticity going back to the first century. There are no such records other than the Gospels. Anyone who comes up with new and novel theories about how to explain the data is always working with the data they got from the Gospels.

And I say, if you're going to work with the data from the Gospels, why not just trust what the Gospels say on the subject? If you distrust the Gospels, why use their data at all? Why even believe there was a Jesus? Why even believe that he died on the cross, or that, you know, people saw him with holes in his hands, or whatever? I mean, why use any of the data if you're not going to take it at face value? After all, if we're going to acknowledge that the Gospels contain any truth, we're going to have to admit that they probably contain the most authoritative truth on the subject available. Since they're the only surviving records from the first century of the life of Christ, they are, or at least three of them, alleged to be eyewitness accounts and the third one is not an eyewitness account, but is based upon eyewitness accounts. That's Luke.

He says that he based his writing on eyewitness accounts. Really, what more could we ask for? Well, of course, what the skeptics would say, well, what I would expect is a similar account written by a non-Christian so that we can't claim that the writers were biased. We can't claim that the authors were making stuff up to make Jesus out to be more than he was.

I'd want to see a history like this from non-Christians. Well, good luck. Why would any non-Christian in the first century even want to write a story of Jesus? He wasn't that significant in his own day.

He never had followers in great numbers outside of his own country. His name was probably unknown in Rome in his own lifetime. And, you know, why would anyone who wasn't a Christian even think him significant enough to write about him? Those who thought him significant were people who became Christians because they thought him significant.

And the disciples can't be blamed that they were Christians. And therefore, that we only have Gospels written by Christians. Who else would care to write them? Who else would notice the significance of Jesus, who was such an obscure character in his day? And even throughout, you know, most of the first century, it was up for grabs whether Christianity was even going to impact the world at all long term.

The Roman historians, Tacitus and Suetonius, actually do make reference to Christianity and to Christ. But they don't make reference to him as someone that they know to be very significant. And how could they? In their day, no one could dream how much Christianity would have impact on the world.

It was a persecuted minority and very likely to be stamped out. It was against the law and the Romans had good ways of getting rid of their illegal movements and no doubt they would succeed, as far as anyone knew, in stamping out Christianity too. It wasn't until centuries later that the significance of Christ would be felt internationally, you know, by almost everybody.

And then it'd be too late to find eyewitnesses to get information about what Jesus did. The only eyewitness accounts that we have of the life of Christ are from people who came to believe in him. But maybe that's in their favor.

Those who are eyewitnesses and saw him, saw things that inclined them to believe. And so they became Christians. The fact that they were convinced that what he said was true is no complaint against their honesty as writers and as historians.

And we should be able to look, even if we're not Christians, at the Gospels as just straightforward historical accounts by people who claim to be eyewitnesses for the most part. But since many are not willing to do that, we have to ask whether there's any outside confirmation to the existence of Christ. And there is.

There's not very much and what there is is very scant. You cannot establish any of the major teachings of Christ from outside information, nor any of the major events of his life with the exception of his death. But there is enough outside information coming from both pagans and Jews of the period to definitely document that Jesus was at least a historical character and that he died on a cross under Pontius Pilate.

We can also document that as soon as 50 AD, as early as 50 AD, there were Christians saying that Jesus had risen from the dead as far away from the starting point of Christianity as Rome. There was a church in Rome by 50 AD. That's only 20 years after the crucifixion of Jesus.

These points can be documented from pagan and Jewish sources. Once having done that, we're left only to make explanations of those facts. If there was a man named Jesus, if he was crucified under Pontius Pilate and within 20 years of his death there are people all over the empire who believe he had risen from the dead, including as far away as Rome, we'd have to say there'd be something, some event, we might not wish to say it was an actual resurrection from the dead, but there must be some event that convinced the contemporaries of that time that this incredible story of a man who is actually known to be a criminal under Roman law actually turned out to be God and rose from the dead.

How could one expect to convince the Roman world of this or the Jewish world? And yet we know that Christianity spread very much and of course that raises problems for people who wish to deny the authenticity of the gospel. But let's look at what we have. As I said, it's fairly scant and the reason it's scant, especially from pagan sources, is because the pagan writers and pagan simply means people who aren't Jewish, Gentiles.

The Gentiles, for the most part, who are not Christians, didn't know Jesus was important enough to pay much attention to, but they did know that he existed. Cornelius Tacitus was the most important Roman historian during the time of the Empire. His life spans from 55 AD to 117 AD, which means that most of his life was spent in the first century, the same century that Jesus lived and died and the apostles spread the gospel.

It means, therefore, of course, that official Roman records were still on file when he was writing his histories of the emperors. Now there's no doubt about it, Pilate would have had to send some report back to Rome of the crucifixion of Jesus because Jesus was treated as a felon. It was a felony case, a capital case, and he had to give some account of it and there would have been some records in Rome.

Whether Tacitus ever availed himself of these records or not, we do not know. One of the early church fathers, I think it was Justin Martyr, in writing to a Roman official in defense of Christianity, actually said that Pilate had sent back records to Rome about the crucifixion of Jesus and that they were on file if that officer would like to take a look and see. Now no one knows for sure whether Justin Martyr had seen these records or knew for sure they were there or only assumed that Pilate must have done this because that would be normal Roman procedure and challenged his reader to go and check the records.

Justin Martyr lived in the end of the first century and early second century and he was quite sure that anyone who wished to check the records could find the death certificate and the written legal documents that prove that Pilate had condemned Jesus to death. As I said, whether Tacitus ever availed himself of these records or not, we don't know. But we know that without any desire on his part at all to confirm the historical facts of Christianity, he knew and affirmed that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius.

We see it, for instance, in this quote. He said, therefore, to scotch the rumor... Now this was a rumor that was much later that Nero spread that the Christians had started the fire that burned down Rome. Actually, the rumor was that Nero did it.

And in order to get rid of that rumor and take the heat off himself, he blamed the Christians. That's what Tacitus is writing about in this particular passage. Tacitus says, therefore, to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty a class of men loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.

Christus, meaning Christ in Latin, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor. Now, again, that tells us nothing about the life of Jesus except there really was such a life. There really was such a man.

There was such an execution. It was at the very time and under the same rulers that the Bible records. Pontius Pilate, the governor, Tiberius, the Caesar.

The Gospels affirm that. Furthermore, of course, this persecution of the Christians took place in 64 AD, which was only 34 years after Christ was crucified. And it's quite obvious that there was a significant Christian community loathed for their vices in Rome at this time.

Now, the reason I said there were Christians there as early as 50 AD is there's another quote in Tacitus that I don't have here in your notes, where he mentions that Claudius Caesar ordered all the Jews out of Rome. And Priscilla and Aquila were banished from Rome because they were Jews at that time. And Tacitus tells us the reason that Claudius did this was because of constant insurrections that were instigated by Christus, or presumably meaning that Christian Jews and non-Christian Jews were always in conflict over the issue of Christ.

But that suggests that there was a Christian community in Rome as early as 50 AD, and there seems to be no doubt of that. But here, Cornelius Tacitus affirms the most important point, and that is the historical existence of Jesus and the time and method of his execution. It doesn't actually say he was crucified, but it says he was executed, and that would be by crucifixion, of course, because that's the way the Romans did it.

Suetonius, another Roman historian, writing only a little while later, in 120 AD, in writing about the lives of the first twelve emperors concerning the fire of Rome in Nero's time, wrote, punishment was inflicted on Christians, a class of men addicted to a novel and mischievous superstition. Again, confirming that the Christians were there. But more importantly, Suetonius has the quote that I just attributed a moment ago to Tacitus.

I always get those two guys mixed up. Suetonius is the one who made reference to Claudius vanishing the Jews from Rome, and he said as the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Christus, he expelled them from Rome. So we see that the existence of Christ was taken for granted as a historical fact by these Roman historians.

There wasn't anyone in those days saying that he hadn't existed. Pliny the Younger was the and he was uncertain what to do about Christians. Christianity was an outlawed religion in those days in Rome, but it wasn't certain whether they should prosecute them actively or just prosecute them, like search them out and arrest them, or whether they should just be prosecuted if they identified themselves as Christians.

And writing to the Emperor Trajan, Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, described what he had learned from Christians when they had been interrogated by him. He says, they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light when they sang an anthem to Christ as God, and bound themselves by solemn oaths not to commit any wicked deed but to abstain from all fraud, theft, and adultery, never to break their word or to deny a trust when called upon to honor it, after which it was their custom to separate and then meet again to partake of food. Now this is only 80 years after the death of Christ, and already the Christians were affirming that Christ was God, and they sang anthems to Christ as God.

And so that would be pretty quick. Within the lifetime of some people who were born when Jesus was killed, within the lifetime of a single generation, of course it's two normal generations of 40 years, there was already established and well-documented this view that Jesus was God, which if Jesus didn't make the claim to be God, how did this view originate? There seems to be no explanation other than that Jesus really made the claims in the Gospels that they record of him making. A guy named Mara Bar-Serapion, who is relatively unknown, he's not a famous character except that he wrote a letter to his son which happens to have been found and preserved, I think, in the British Museum today.

He was a Syrian man who was put in prison for some matter of conscience on his part, and he was writing a letter of encouragement to his son not to cave in under persecution and to hold up to his views. Now, he was not a Christian, and whatever his convictions were, I do not know why he was put in prison. I don't know.

He may have resisted the powers that be or whatever. But he was writing to his son to try to show him that the gods or God will have his way against the powers that persecute goodness. And he wrote this in his letter to his son from prison, probably around 73 AD.

He said, What advantage did the Athenians gain from putting Socrates to death? Famine and plague came upon them as a judgment for their crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king? It was just after that that their kingdom was abolished.

Now, their wise king is not mentioned by name, but very clearly this man was familiar with the story of Jesus. And he regarded Jesus to be the Jews' wise king. It can't be any of the other kings of Jewish history, because the Jews didn't execute any other of their kings.

I mean, some of them were assassinated by others who took their power. But the Jews as a whole didn't reject or execute any of their kings except Jesus. Only Jesus can be the one in view, especially in view of the fact that it says only shortly after that their kingdom was abolished.

Obviously it was sometime shortly before 70 AD that he's referring to, and therefore he was knowledgeable at this early date of at least the existence of Christ and of his execution at the hands of the Jews. One other source from Gentile sources is not very helpful, but it's somewhat interesting. There was a guy named Thallus, who was not a Christian, who in 52 AD wrote a history of Greece and of its relations with Asia from the Trojan War to his own time.

And unfortunately we don't have his works today. They have not survived. But a few centuries after his time, in 221 AD, a Christian named Julius Africanus did have access to Thallus' work, and he assumed everyone had it in his day.

Thallus' work was widely available apparently in that time, and quotes from it. And that's all we know about Thallus is what he is quoted from. But Julius Africanus is responding to something Thallus wrote.

Thallus was writing about the darkness that overshadowed the land in the middle of the day when Jesus was crucified. And he apparently explained it as a solar eclipse. And so Julius Africanus, responding to Thallus, said, Thallus in his third book of his histories explains away this darkness as an eclipse of the sun, unreasonably as it seems to make it.

The reason it's unreasonable is because it's impossible to have an eclipse of the sun at full moon. The moon and the sun have to be, and the earth has to be, in position in such a way for there to be a full moon that is exactly opposite of the way they have to be when there's eclipse. And Jesus was crucified at Passover, which was full moon, and therefore there couldn't have been an eclipse of the sun.

Interesting though, this Thallus apparently took for granted that it turned dark at that time. As I said, that's not very helpful to us because the darkness that occurred when Jesus died is not one of the more important things about the life of Christ. But these are the scant things we have from pagan sources of the general period that tend to confirm a few things in the Gospels.

Now, the Jewish sources are much more full, although even they are not anything like the Gospels in terms of content. There's two basic Jewish sources of information about Jesus from early on. One is the Talmud itself.

The Jewish Talmud contains a number of references to Christ, always very disparaging, always very much holding him in contempt, usually calling him by a nickname, although at least once they call him Yeshu of Nazareth, which is another form of the name Jesus. But they usually call him the Hanged One, which is a term of contempt because the law said, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. They also sometimes called him the son of Pantheros.

It's not certain whether Pantheros is intended to be the name of a soldier who they claim had sexual relations with Mary. And the Talmud does suggest that Jesus was the illegitimate son of Mary and some unknown father. Or whether Pantheros is a textual corruption of an original that once said Parthenos, which is the word for virgin, so that they would be calling him the son of the virgin.

Not because they really believed that, but because that's what the Christians claimed to be and almost using that as a term of ridicule. For whatever reasons they call him the son of Pantheros and also the Hanged One. But there's no question in the references in the Talmud who they're referring to.

Now the Talmud was written down in the early 4th century, I believe it was. But it was existing in oral form for many centuries before that. And therefore it embodies a very early tradition from the people who actually had seen and known Jesus, but his enemies.

Therefore their stories are not very favorable. But one passage in particular in the Talmud reads this way. On the eve of the Passover they hanged Yeshu of Nazareth.

And the herald went before him forty days saying, Yeshu of Nazareth is going forth to be stoned and that he practiced sorcery and beguiled and led Israel astray. But they found not in his defense and hanged him on the eve of the Passover. Now this doesn't agree with the Gospels except in a few points.

It agrees that Jesus was hanged on the eve of the Passover. It also agrees with the Gospels in saying that the Pharisees accused him of practicing sorcery or doing his miracles by the power of Beelzebub and beguiling the people. Where it disagrees with the Gospels is where it says that they originally intended to stone him and that they sent a herald for forty days in advance looking to see if there's any evidence in his favor that could be brought forward.

The Gospels obviously represent the situation much differently than that. We might ask ourselves though which accounts most likely to be lying or most likely to be changed. The story as it is in the Talmud, if it were true, would not be a damning story to the Christians and therefore there'd be no reason for them to tell such a radically different story as they tell in the Gospels.

There'd be no motive, no obvious or compelling motive for the Christians to change the story if it really happened the way that it's written in the Talmud. However, if it really happened the way it's written in the Gospels, there would be a compelling motive for the Jews to change it and read the way it is here. Because what they really did according to the Gospels is conduct a court that was even against Jewish law, a midnight court which was against the law and much hypocrisy, false witnesses paid and so forth, no chance for an appeal on the part of the convicted and so forth.

All that was against Jewish law. Therefore, if it really happened the way the Gospels record, one could see why the Jews might in retelling the story change it a little bit to make it sound like they were a little more fair and a little more lawful. In other words, we could see why the details in this passage that differ from the Gospels might have been changed by the Jews to cover their tales.

But we can't understand why the Christians would have changed them. There's really nothing about the way it's told here that would necessarily hurt the Christian cause if it were told this way. Of course, one thing that's really interesting here is that they acknowledge that he was accused of sorcery.

This proves, or at least it gives evidence, against those who say that Jesus never really did any miracles, but the miracle stories were just embellishments and legends that came up later in the next century when people were trying to make Jesus out to be superhuman in their memories. But, and there are many who believe that, that Jesus never really did miracles, but those are just stories made up by later generations of Christians. However, the Jews of the time didn't deny it all, or even didn't dispute that Jesus did supernatural things.

They just accused him of doing sorcery, which is exactly what the Gospels say they said. In Matthew chapter 12, they said he's casting out these demons by the power of Beelzebub. And they accused him of having a demon in John chapter 8. And so what this confirms is that certain things out of the ordinary, supernatural things, were done by Jesus.

The Jews claimed it was sorcery. The Talmud proves that, and the Gospels itself says that that was their interpretation of it. But it certainly shows that those who claim Jesus never did anything remarkable, and that such stories were fabrications of the later generation, are weak attempts at discrediting the Gospels.

Now a more important source of information from the Jewish world was Flavius Josephus, and he didn't say much either. Although what he said is helpful, again he had no idea how important Jesus would be in history. He was, he was born in Jerusalem, what, in 37 AD, right at the very beginning of the church age.

And he had no way of knowing how significant the church would become. And therefore his references to Christ are few and far between, but they are, they are objective. And in one passage, where he's talking about the destruction of Herod's armies in Antiquities of the Jews, book 18, chapter 5, paragraph 2, Josephus says, Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment for what he did against John, who was called the Baptist.

For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to justice toward one another, and piety toward God, and so to come to baptism. Now it's a very brief mention of John the Baptist, no mention of Christ here, but John is otherwise unknown, except from the Gospels. And the Gospels give John a prominent place of importance.

In fact, they make him out to be the first one to point to Jesus as the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. The fact that John existed and that his ministry followed generally the same character that the Gospels describe is confirmed by Josephus, who was not a follower of John or of Jesus, and probably was not, had no opportunity to ever read the Gospels. Therefore we have an independent witness to the basic character and message of John the Baptist from Josephus, and it agrees fully with what we read about him in the Gospels.

Another passage in Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20, Chapter 9, Paragraph 1, says, So Ananus the high priest assembled a council of judges, and brought before it the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ, whose name was James. Together with some others, and having accused them as lawbreakers, he delivered them over to be stoned. Now this is the death of James.

Interestingly, the Gospels, or the Book of Acts, doesn't even record this death of James, though James was a prominent character in Acts, the leader of the church in Jerusalem. We are indebted to Josephus for giving us the only recorded record of how James died. He died at the hands of the high priest and some other priests after the Roman governor was removed from power, and before the new one could come, the Jews took advantage of that opportunity to kill James.

But the interesting thing about it is that Josephus gives more attention to James than to Jesus, but he knew that James was known as the brother of someone named Jesus, who is the so-called Christ. Now Josephus is a very early local witness to things going on in the early church age, and that Jesus was known to have a brother named James, is true to the Bible, and that he was called the Christ. Josephus does not confirm that Jesus was the Christ, but he confirms that people called him the Christ, and that there was such a man.

Now in the most controversial passage in Josephus, we have a direct reference to Jesus, and let me read it to you. This comes from Antiquities of the Jews, book 18, chapter 3, paragraph 3, says, And there arose about this time a wise man, if indeed we should call him a man. For he was a doer of marvelous deeds, a teacher of men who received the truth with pleasure.

He led away many Jews and also many of the Greeks. This man was the Christ, and when Pilate had condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him at the first did not cease, for he appeared to them on the third day alive again, the divine prophets having spoken these and thousands of other wonderful things about him, and even now the tribe of Christians so named after him has not yet died out. Now you can see why this is disputed.

Josephus was not a Christian, and yet this passage sounds like it was written by a Christian. He says, if we dare call him a man, and he was a teacher of those who received the truth with pleasure, and he was the Christ, and he appeared to them the third day after he was dead and fulfilled many prophecies. Now many have said for this reason that the passage is not authentic and that a Christian stuck it in there after Josephus' time.

The problem is the textual evidence is in favor of the passage. Every manuscript of Josephus that has survived has this passage in it. Furthermore, it is very identical to Josephus' recognizable style.

If it is a forgery, it was a very good forgery. The person copied very well Josephus' regular style of Greek writing. The textual evidence and the stylistic evidence is in favor of it being authentic.

The only thing that's a problem is the contents, and it is said that a man who is not a Christian, like Josephus, could never have said these things. However, it is possible that some textual corruption has occurred. It is possible that the word truth was mistaken for the word strange things, which are similar in the Greek, and that where it says he was the Christ, a copyist has accidentally dropped out the expression so-called.

We know that Josephus, in an undisputed passage, called Jesus the so-called Christ. He may have done so here. It's also possible that the reference to his resurrection and fulfillment of prophecies may have previously been included the phrase as they claim or something like that, in which case the passage would read, There arose about this time Jesus, a wise man, if indeed we should call him a man, for he is a doer of marvelous deeds and a teacher of men who receive strange things with pleasure.

He led away many Jews and also many of the Greeks. This man was the so-called Christ. And when Pilate had condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him at first did not cease, for as they claim, he appeared to them on the third day alive again, the divine prophets having spoken these and many thousands of other wonderful things about him.

And even now the tribe of Christians so named after him has not yet died out. If that's the way it originally read, which is entirely possible, then it could be an authentic passage and another confirmation of Christ, although it is the one that is least secure. And we can't say for sure.

But of course the Gospels are our best records of the life of Christ. But these outside sources prove that Jesus did live. We'll go to the Gospels, however, for the more specifics of his life.