Original subtitles

Every Sunday, in every corner of the world, people gather

to hear a story.

For more than 2 ,000 years, that story has been told and retold.

Along the way, each generation has found in its telling its own meaning and

interpretation.

That story of a man called Jesus of Nazareth, a man who became

Jesus Christ, was originally told by his first followers and

then retold in accounts by later believers in the Gospels.

So began the building of a religion.

Now it is our turn, with the help of scholars and historians, theologians and

archaeologists, to return to that time and use our best effort to understand

that story of a man born in obscurity in

whose name a faith was made.

We know so little about him that he was born more than 2 ,000 years ago and that

he lived in Palestine.

We know he was baptized and became a preacher.

And we know that he was publicly executed.

What manner of man is this that even the winds and the seas obey him?

With so little evidence to go by, archaeologists must sift the clues and

scholars decode the stories told by the first followers of Jesus.

The problem for any historian in trying to reconstruct the life of Jesus is

simply that we don't have sources that come from the actual time of Jesus

himself.

The historian's task in understanding Jesus and the Jesus movement and early

Christianity is a lot like the archaeologist's task in excavating a

You peel back layer after layer after layer of interpretation.

And what you always find is the plurality of Jesuses.

History isn't made to record the deeds of a person like Jesus.

Jesus is very much like most people, statistically speaking, who have ever

existed in the world. Poor, obscure, no pretensions to royalty or distinction of

any kind.

They live under less than desirable conditions, and they die that way.

There's nothing historically remarkable about that.

Billions of people pass through this veil of tears in exactly that way.

We can tell the story by looking at the way the earliest Christians themselves

thought about Jesus, by the way they kept his memory alive, by the way that

told the story.

Central to the story is the fact that Jesus was born a subject of the Roman

Empire.

And in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world

should be taxed.

Jesus was born during the reign of the Emperor Augustus in the sort of a

economy of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace.

And in every coin that Augustus had were the words Divi Filius, son of the

divine one, Julius Caesar, son of God.

This is on every billboard in the Mediterranean world.

He is the savior of the world, and he brings the peace.

Now, you may have scruples about how he brings the peace, but he brings peace to

Rome, and as the saying goes in Latin, peace to the Rome and quiet to the

provinces.

This is he.

Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who shall restore the golden age and spread his

empire.

Rome's empire spread across the Mediterranean, sweeping through North

reaching as far west as Spain.

To the east, it encompassed Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Palestine.

where Jesus was born in the Jewish land of Judea, then ruled by King Herod.

In Judea, the king, Herod, was in effect a client king. He ruled almost in place

of Rome. He was the voice of Rome, the instrument of Rome, probably instrument

of Rome is best in that, because he had his own independent notion, certainly.

Herod the Great was probably one of the...

greatest kings of the post -biblical period in Israel, but you wouldn't want

your daughter to date him. He was ambitious, brutal, extremely successful.

And it is one of the real untold ironies of Jewish history that this man, who's

the guy you love to hate in Jewish history, really, leaves the most

mark on the face of the land of Israel.

It appears that Herod thought of Jerusalem as his showpiece.

He really wanted to make it a place where people would come just as people

have gone to Athens or Rome or the great cities of the Mediterranean world.

A meticulously accurate model of ancient Jerusalem shows the extraordinary scale

of Herod's building program.

And so when Herod built the city or helped to rebuild the city, he did so on

monumental scale.

And this can be seen in the rebuilding of the temple.

We know exactly how Herod rebuilt the temple

because detailed descriptions of the architecture have survived.

Along the coast, Herod constructed an aqueduct 40 miles long.

It brought water to a new seaport he had built.

In honor of the Roman emperor Caesar, Herod named the city Caesarea.

We really need to get a feel for a city like Caesarea Maritima at the time of

Jesus, precisely because it shows the crucial intersection of Roman rule in

Jesus' own homeland.

In this thriving seaport, the power of Rome, its culture and commerce,

every aspect of daily life.

In the middle of the city was a Roman city, complete with the capital temples

the deified Roma, that is the personification of Rome itself.

The political reality of the day was of a dominant power

overseeing the life on a day -to -day basis.

Into this political climate, Jesus was born.

The Gospels present the familiar account of his birth.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and

laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn.

Our best guess for the birth date of Jesus would be 4 BCE.

In other words, he was born before the death of Herod the Great, who died in 4

BCE. But I emphasize best and guess.

The Gospels claim Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

Historians think it is more likely that he was born and grew up near the Sea of

Galilee, in the village called Nazareth.

The region was known for being a hotbed of political activity, some of it

violent.

In the last few generations of New Testament scholarship, the Galilee has

achieved this reputation for being the hotbed of radicalism.

You know, the, I don't know, the 60s Berkeley of Palestine.

The Galilee, by most of the traditional accounts, is always portrayed as a kind

of bucolic backwater, peasants on the hillside.

And yet our recent archaeological discoveries have shown this not to be

case.

Nazareth stands less than four miles from a major urban center.

Sepphoris was founded as the capital

of the Galilee, and so it was really invested, much like Caesarea Maritima,

all the trappings of Greek or Roman city life.

Recent archaeological discoveries at Sepphoris challenge the conventional

picture of Jesus' life.

One of the more exciting discoveries that we made at Sepphoris was a

Roman villa with a gorgeous, gorgeous mosaic on its floor in a banquet

hall.

The lady was dubbed Mona Lisa by the press when we found her because she is

really an extraordinary depiction of a beautiful woman of Roman antiquity.

And the picture we get is a community very much in the mainstream, but on the

high end of the scale.

Sepphoris was not just a city with houses and with waterworks and things

that, but it had satellite settlements around Nazareth to all intents and

purposes.

attached to the region or municipality of Sepphoris. The findings

really are requiring us completely to rethink Jesus' social economic

setting because we really had thought of Jesus as being really out in the

hinterland, utterly removed from urban life, especially

Roman -influenced urban life.

What the excavations at Sepphoris suggest is that Jesus was quite

thriving and sophisticated urban environment that would have brought with

of the diversity of the Roman Empire and would have required, just to get on,

you know, as the price of doing business, a level of sophistication that

would not have thought characteristic of Jesus, the humble carpenter.

Scholars today question the image of Jesus the humble carpenter and disagree

about his social class.

They were astounded and said, Where did this man get this wisdom?

Is not this the carpenter's son?

The difficulty for us in hearing a term like carpenter is that we immediately

think of a highly skilled worker, and at least in North America, in the middle

class, making a very high income.

As soon as we take that into the ancient world, we are totally lost.

Because first of all, there was no middle class in the ancient world. There

the haves and the have -nots, to put it very simply.

And in the anthropology of peasant societies, to say that somebody is an

or a carpenter is not to compliment them.

It is to say that they are lower in the pecking order than a peasant farmer.

Very few scholars now believe that Jesus was of such lowly birth.

I'm not entirely convinced that we could characterize Jesus as a peasant. I

think that that probably miscasts Jesus, especially in view of the more recent

discoveries at Severus and elsewhere.

He must be someone in the artisan class if he's working in the building

industry. And in all probability, that would mean where he might grow up and

live in Nazareth, he likely went to Sepphoris to earn his living.

And this puts him in the interesting mix of cultures that would have been the

daily life of a city like Sepphoris, through the marketplace, in the

And Sepphoris itself as a city was built precisely at the time that Jesus was

growing up and living just next door.

You couldn't deal and wheel either in the workplace or in the market without

knowing a good deal of Greek. And I can't hardly imagine anybody worth their

salt who wouldn't know some Greek.

Jesus was trilingual.

Jesus participated in both the Aramaic and Hebrew culture and its literatures,

as well as the kind of Hellenistic Greek that he needed to do his business and

his ministry.

Despite its Greek and Roman influences, Sepphoris was a thoroughly Jewish city,

and Jesus remained faithful to his religious heritage when he left Nazareth

become a preacher.

Then he began to speak and taught them, saying, Do not think I have come to

abolish the law or the prophets.

I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill.

What we learn from the gospel stories is not that Jesus was not Jewish, quite

the opposite.

He's completely embedded in the Judaism of his time.

Was Jesus a Jew? Of course Jesus was a Jew. He was born of a Jewish mother in

Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues,

disciples, all of them were Jews.

He regularly worshipped in Jewish communal worship, what we call

He preached from Jewish texts from the Bible.

He celebrated Jewish festivals.

He was born, lived, died, taught as a Jew.

Nowadays, there are temples and synagogues everywhere you go.

There's not a Jewish community in the world that doesn't have a synagogue, and

many of them are called temples.

In this period, however, we should always remember that there is only one

temple. That's the one temple in Jerusalem.

For Jews living in the time of Jesus,

The temple in Jerusalem was the center of their religious life.

The Jewish historian Josephus has a very memorable line. He says, one temple for

the one God.

The Jews saw themselves as a unique people with one God, one God alone, and

one God of this one special people had one temple.

And that's a very powerful idea.

reflecting accurately, I think, the historical truth that the temple was a

powerful, unifying source within the Jewish community.

This was the one most sacred place on earth, the one place on earth where the

earth rises up and the heavens somehow descend just enough that they just

This is the only one place on the entire earth where this was so.

The temple in Jerusalem was the symbolic part of the country.

Jews everywhere, if they chose to, if they were pious, would put aside part of

their income. It's sort of like the way Christmas clubs operate now. You'd put

aside money explicitly to be spent having a party in Jerusalem.

Although the temple was the centerpiece of Jewish life and worship, Judaism was

not a state religion.

There's no such thing as a state herd.

It's not a monolithic religious or cultural entity at this time. Indeed,

we're seeing more and more through the research and the archaeological

discoveries is how diverse Judaism was in this period.

Sometimes reading ancient sources is like overhearing family quarrels in a

distant room.

And some of the most endearing aspects, I can say this because I don't live in

the first century, but the most endearing aspects of reading this

we still have is overhearing the lively quarrels. I mean, people who weren't

priests at all would have absolutely firm opinions on how the priests should

doing their business.

There will have been a whole wide variety of groups in Jerusalem and

the countryside as a whole.

These are the revolutionary groups who took their religious understanding of

what Judaism was and turned that into political program, political agenda.

We must destroy the Roman Empire, or we must destroy Jews who cooperate with the

Roman Empire.

We now know that other groups had even more extreme views, and their ideas shed

new light on Jesus' own message.

One of the best examples of the vibrantly different thought that's at

Judaism in this period is of course now what we know from the discovery of the

Dead Sea Scrolls.

As you leave Jerusalem and go to the south and to the east toward the Dead

the terrain changes rapidly and starkly.

You move off gradually from rolling hillside through the ravines, and it

stark and desolate.

It's dry, it's arid, it's rocky, and it's rough.

And then all of a sudden, within a span of only about 13 miles, the entire

terrain drops out in front of you at the surface of the Dead Sea.

It is in that rugged cliff face on the banks of the Dead Sea that

the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at the site known as Khirbet Qumran.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are usually thought to have been produced by a group known

as the Essenes.

And the Essenes are a group that literally abandoned in Jerusalem, it

protest against the way the temple was being run.

And they go to the desert to get away from what they see to be the worldliness

of Jerusalem and the worldliness of the temple.

The Manual of Discipline, or in Hebrew, Sarah Hayahad, envisages a community

living in almost total isolation.

A community that is self -contained, that is governed very strictly. There is

oath of entry.

It is very much a monastic community.

Everyone who wishes to join the congregation of the elect must pledge

live according to the rule of the community, to love all the children of

and to hate all the children of darkness.

The Essenes are what we might best call an apocalyptic sect of Judaism.

An apocalyptic sect is one that thinks of itself as, first of all,

the true form of the religion.

By apocalyptic expectation, I mean that some group has an apocalypsis in Greek,

a revelation that God is going to finally solve the problem of injustice,

unrighteousness, evil in the world by totally eradicating the evil.

That's the terrible price of apocalypse.

There's going to be a lot of very dead people.

Totally eradicating evil. And we, the good, whoever we are, are going to live

with God, be it heaven on earth or earth in heaven.

forever in justice and holiness and righteousness.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, we hear not of just one Messiah, but at least two

Messiahs.

Some of their writings talk about a Messiah of Aaron, a priestly figure who

come to restore the temple at Jerusalem to its proper purity and worship of God.

But there's also a Messiah of David that is a kind of kingly figure who will

come to lead the war.

The Qumran scrolls reveal a variety of scenarios for the end of days. The best

-known one, perhaps, is the scroll called The War of the Thuns of Light.

against the Sons of Darkness.

And at some point, there will be a major battle, a cataclysmic struggle, not

just between people, but also between cosmic forces, the cosmic forces of evil

and the cosmic forces of good.

And needless to say, this will end with a victory for the Sons of Light, in

other words, for the group itself.

Now, we typically think of this as reflecting a belief in the end of the

But in fact, that's not exactly what they thought.

They use language like the end or the last things or the last days.

But what they mean is the present evil age is coming to an end.

This is really more in the vein of a transformation of the present social

and a return to a kind of golden age of statehood and independence.

So it's really kind of a political expectation.

It's not otherworldly. In fact, when it comes, it'll be right here and right

now.

History offers no evidence that Jesus was influenced by the Essenes, but their

apocalyptic challenge struck... chords that reverberated throughout the

and echoed through the message of a prophet known as John the Baptist.

In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea,

proclaiming, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

John the Baptist was a renowned kind of eccentric, it appears, from the way that

Josephus describes him.

But he seems to have had this quality of a kind of prophetic figure, one who was

calling for change.

So he is usually thought of as being off in the desert, wearing unusual clothes,

a kind of ascetic almost.

John is taking people out into the desert, crossing the Jordan.

He is recapitulating the Exodus, and he is planting little ticking time bombs of

apocalyptic expectation all over the Jewish homeland, waiting for God to

as it were.

It was as John's disciples, the Gospels

say, that Jesus submitted to the ancient Jewish rite of baptism.

The evidence that Jesus was a follower of John is as strong as anything

historians can find about Jesus.

The reason is a certain embarrassment in the text trying to explain why on earth

would Jesus be apparently inferior to John. If he goes and is baptized by

then somehow we have to explain how that can happen.

The Gospels then go on to say that Jesus was the one predicted by John.

Most contemporary scholars would see that to be a construct developed by the

early church to help explain the relationship between the two.

The difference I see between John the Baptist and Jesus is, to use some fancy

academic language, John is an apocalyptic eschatologist.

An eschatologist is somebody who sees that the problem of the world is so

radical that it's going to take some kind of divine radicality.

God is going to descend in some sort of a catastrophic event to solve the world.

There is another type of eschatology, and that's why I think Jesus is talking.

I'm going to call it ethical eschatology.

That is the demand that God is making on us.

not us and God so much as God on us to do something about the evil in the

We don't know to what extent Jesus remained faithful to John's apocalyptic

message, but at some point after his baptism by John, Jesus seems to have

embarked on his career as a preacher.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in the synagogues and proclaiming the

good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among

people.

Jesus' career apparently was centered mostly in the towns and villages in a

small cities in the area of the Galilee, his home region.

Jesus' ministry in the Galilee is rather complicated, but I think we can begin

to get the real better understanding of it through archaeology and through

higher literary studies of the Gospels today.

Those villages there were absolutely essential to his ministry.

He's avoiding the big towns or cities, probably because the elements who run

those cities are of...

such a high class that they're probably not interested in Jesus' message.

Whether he was himself a simple man of the people or someone far more

sophisticated, Jesus does seem to have pitched his message at ordinary people

and to have impressed them with his healing powers.

The healings seems to have been something of a specialty of his.

for which he had a great reputation.

People would bring from miles around, judging from the Gospels, to bring their

thick, the frail, to Jesus to be healed.

I love the story about Jesus reaching down and picking up the dust and mixing

with his own spit and forming a kind of healing balm that he applies to someone.

And it's also interesting that in one healing case, Jesus sort of misses the

mark embedded and has to refine the cure that he's applying.

So one finds the intrusions of popular culture in these Jesus traditions that

are being elaborated through natural processes of storytelling.

Now, we need to be aware that there are other miracle workers around at the

time. So just the idea of performing miracles is not in itself unique.

In the first century, in one sense, everyone, including later in the

Vespasian, when he was becoming the emperor, were miracle workers, if they

important enough.

What really was unusual about Jesus is why would God work through a Jewish

peasant? That sort of struck the Roman imagination as unbelievable.

Not that there would be miracles, but that miracles might be performed by a

Jewish peasant.

Jesus limited his circulation to the agrarian populace, and his teaching

was characterized by metaphors that would be readily understood by agrarian

populations.

Jesus said to his apostles,

Give them something to eat.

They replied, We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.

And he said, Bring them here to me.

The feeding of the multitudes is one of the few stories that's told in all four

Gospels. That's a story near and dear to many people's hearts.

Jesus goes into the Galilean hillside.

He takes about 5 ,000 people with him. And it's there that they have a picnic.

even though there are no provisions made for that.

He multiplies five loaves and two fishes to feed this multitude of people.

Well, I don't think it takes rocket science to figure out why that kind of

is so endearing to poor people.

I mean, that's dinner and a show.

Behind the simple rustic imagery, was the message of the coming kingdom of

an enigma Jesus did not attempt to simplify.

Jesus tells a parable about somebody who takes a mustard seed, plants it in the

ground, and it grows up to be a great tree, or a bush at least.

A weed, though, in plain language.

Now, imagine an audience reacting to that.

Presumably the kingdom is like this, and they have to figure out what's it like.

You mean the kingdom is big?

But you just said it's a big weed, so why don't you say a big cedar of

Why a big weed?

Besides this mustard, we're not certain we like this mustard. It's very

dangerous in our fields. We try to control it. We try to contain it.

Why do you mean the kingdom is something that people try to control and contain?

Every reaction in the audience, the audience fighting with themselves, as it

were, answering back to Jesus, is doing exactly what he wants. It's making them

think. Not about mustard, of course, but about the kingdom.

But the trap is that this is a very provocative, even a weird image for the

kingdom. To say the kingdom is like a cedar of leaven and everyone would yawn

and say, of course.

It's like a mustard seed.

What's going on here?

people will tend to focus on Jesus as some sort of social reformer or

as an apocalyptic firebrand preaching a coming kingdom of God on earth.

And yet it must be recognized that those are very different images, very

different kinds of individuals, and yet both are reflected within the gospel's

tradition.

He may have preached social change.

He may have preached a new kingdom on earth.

Either way, Jesus was bound to find himself in conflict with the Roman

authorities.

The core of Jesus' preaching is the kingdom of God. And the difficulty for

to hear that term as 100 % political and 100 % religious. Not one, not the

other. In the first century, those were inextricably intertwined.

The kingdom, if you use that expression in the first century, what meant the

Roman kingdom? It meant the Roman Empire.

When you talked about the kingdom of God and were somehow setting it up in some

tension with the Roman Empire, you were making a very caustic criticism of the

Roman Empire and you were saying that its system was not the system of God.

The Jewish historian Josephus tells us a number of stories about characters

whose career could be crudely summarized as following.

Some guy wakes up in the morning and he thinks he's the Messiah or something, or

he's a prophet and he gets a group of people to follow him.

He says, we're going to go out in the desert and we're going to wait for God

do something for us.

So a whole bunch of people may go with him, maybe thousands, go with him out to

this deserted, unsecured place.

and they wait for what Josephus calls the tokens of their deliverance.

And the Romans send a vicious police action out there and kill

everybody.

That kind of police action.

is perpetrated against what we might consider harmless fanatics, the Romans

really giving us a very good historical lesson in how domination works.

All the time that Jesus is talking, I cannot not imagine the fact that he's

going to be put to death.

Everything that he is doing is politically dangerous.

If you are following Jesus' life day to day, you should be saying to yourself,

somebody is going to kill this man.

After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.

Moving to Jerusalem, Jesus was moving from the territory ruled by Herod

to the territory ruled directly by Rome through a prefect, Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate was the governor from 26 to 36.

And so that places us very clearly within the early period of Roman rule.

are some of our most important and clearest dates for the activities of

life. When Jesus actually died, we're not absolutely sure.

Some people would say as early as maybe 27, maybe some others as late as 33.

But we do know it's under Pilate.

Pontius Pilatus, Praefectus Judei, Pontius Pilate.

Governor of Judea.

We know of him as an effective and fairly ruthless administrator of his

territory, the area of Judea. There are several episodes recorded by Josephus

where eschatological prophets emerge, and Pilate has no hesitation in

eliminating them or in suppressing episodes of potential conflict or revolt

within that territory.

People from all over the empire went to Jerusalem on Passover. It's one of the

most populated times in the whole city.

It's a madhouse. There are extra animals being brought up, sheep, because of the

Passover holiday. There are pilgrims coming in from everywhere.

And Jesus comes up to town, too.

He could have stayed home and had Passover in the Galilee, but he didn't.

He's up in Jerusalem because this is important.

Pilate would get nervous when there were crowds of Jews, and of course he was

legally responsible to be up in Jerusalem when it was the most crowded

He would leave this very nice, plush seaside town in Caesarea, which was, you

know, a nice pagan city, plenty of pagan altars, all the stuff he wanted, and

have to go up to Jerusalem where...

where all these Jews were congregating and stay there for crowd control until

the holiday was over. He was in a bad mood already by the time he got to town,

and Passover would fray anybody's nerves.

If you were a pilgrim coming to Jerusalem in these days, you would walk

the streets of this magnificent city.

As you approach the Temple Mount, You come up to this massive, monumental

complex that we call the temple.

And there are grand staircases up which one can go and get up to the top.

And you come out up on top of the platform in the outer precincts of the

complex.

that were garrisoned in Jerusalem would have been stationed in the nearby

fortress called the Antonia, which literally stands adjacent to the temple

complex and kind of looks over it.

They could keep an eye on things there. And, of course, everyone in the temple

knew they were there, too.

Particularly at Passover, which is a holiday that vibrates with this

historical memory of national creation and freedom.

And the Roman soldiers standing along the colonnade of the temple looking down

at Jews celebrating this. So it's a politically and religiously electric

holiday.

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in

the temple.

And he overturned the tables of the money changers.

The difficulty with the story of Jesus and the money changers in the temple is

that the story is told in slightly different ways in different gospels.

For example, in Mark's gospel, and in fact in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all

three, this event occurs in the last week of Jesus' life.

And it is clearly the event which brings him to the attention both of the temple

leadership and the Roman authorities.

It is, in effect, what gets him killed.

John's Gospel, interestingly enough, though, puts the story of the cleansing

the temple as the very first episode in Jesus' public career, more than two

years earlier.

And no mention is made of it near his death.

So there are a few problems with the story itself, although it is one of the

stories that appears in all the Gospels. So something is going on there.

It's unclear how he actually gets into trouble.

He wouldn't have wandered into the crosshairs of the priest because

how the Pharisees are criticizing the priest, what Jesus is doing is fairly

minimal.

If he had been complaining about the priest or criticizing them or

the way the temple was being run, this would just, it's business as usual. This

is one of the aspects of being a Jew.

Another possibility, though, is that Jesus sounds more like the Essenes, who

were really criticizing the whole way the temple is run as having become too

worldly, too caught up in the money of the day,

or maybe just too Roman.

And if that's the case, then his action looks much more like an act of political

subversion.

Try and imagine the temple for what it was. It was both the house of God and

seat of collaboration.

It was the high priest Caiaphas who had to collaborate with the Roman

occupation.

Now, how would Jesus as a Galilean peasant see the temple?

I think with ferocious ambiguity.

On the one hand, it was the seat of God, and you would die to defend it from,

say,

a Roman emperor like Caligula putting a statue in there.

But what would you do when it was also the place where Caiaphas collaborated

with the Romans?

Was the temple really the house of God anymore?

What Jesus does is not cleanse the temple. He symbolically destroys it.

If you really think the end of the world is at hand, that has a kind of

liberating and frantic energy that goes along with it, it's not good for quiet

crowds and social stability.

And given the emotional and religious tenor of this holiday anyway, to have

somebody preaching that the kingdom of God was really on its way, perhaps it

going to be coming within that very holiday, preaching that in the days

Passover,

It's the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater.

The Gospels agree that this politically charged climate was the occasion for his

arrest. But what happened next, and the role played by the priests, remains

unclear.

I think there's some kind of cooperation between the chief priests and Pilate.

The chief priests always had to cooperate with Rome because it's their

They're mediating between the imperial government and the people.

And there was a perceived danger that Pilate was on the verge of some kind of

muscular crowd control. People would get hurt or killed when Pilate felt so

moved. And perhaps for this reason, Jesus was turned over to Rome.

The most difficult thing for us after 2 ,000 years is to bring our imagination

down when we're looking at the passion of Jesus.

Because we want to think the whole world was watching, or all of the Roman

Empire was watching, or all of Jerusalem was watching.

I take it for granted there were standing orders between Pilate and

about how to handle lower class, especially dissidents, who caused

Passover.

Jesus would have represented, you know, a kind of activist and resistor

in Pontius Pilate's experience that he had been dealing with for years and with

varying degrees of success and effectiveness, obviously.

But Jesus would have been a blip on the screen of Pontius Pilate because the

unrest and the uprisings were so common.

part of daily life for the Roman administration of Judea, that Jesus

been seen, I think, as very little out of the ordinary.

Now, I don't for a moment think that Pilate would have been worried that

could have challenged the power of the emperor.

That's not the point.

The point is, any challenge to Roman authority, any challenge to the peace of

Rome, would have been met with a swift...

and violent responders.

In dealing with a person who was guilty of sedition, Pilate had considerable

leeway. He was probably driven by convention, and that is the process of

executing state criminals through crucifixion.

There is no doubt in my mind but that the persons responsible for the actual

execution of Jesus were the Romans.

The Romans practiced crucifixion. While it was not unknown to the Jewish people,

it was not a form of Jewish execution.

Then they brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha, which means the place

skull.

A crucifixion site was usually near, say, a main road into the city. It was a

warning location.

The uprights for the crosses were usually left there permanently.

And you have to think of that site as not a place where people would go

regularly.

It's an abhorrent site. It's supposed to be a warning, even when nobody is

hanging there.

So the idea that there would be crowds around the crucifixion, leave out

Passover or anything like that, just watching, I think most people would

probably avert their eyes and walk away because they don't want to be on the

side of the Romans who are killing and crucifying.

one more good Jew among the thousands who'd been crucified in the first

of that century.

Death by crucifixion was certainly an awful, awful experience for the

persecuted individual.

It was slow, it was painful, and it was public terror.

It's not from bleeding.

It's not from the wounds themselves that the death occurs. It's rather a

suffocation because one can't hold oneself up enough to breathe properly.

And so over time, really, it's the exposure to the elements and the gradual

of breath that produces death.

We don't have that much detail about...

the actual crucifixion of Jesus, what we have are the stories in the gospel. And

there, interestingly and appropriately, the gospel writers are drawing on

psalms, psalms that in the Jewish canon are often cries to God.

And they're grabbing onto that literature to shape their narrative

of the crucifixion.

Those are cries of terror and loneliness.

They really appeal to God for meaning.

The words that are put in Jesus' mouth in Mark, why have you forsaken me?

It's the religious power of the Psalms that is really one of those wonderful

moments of concrete continuity between what this very passionately religious

first century Jew might have been thinking as he was dying this horrible

on the cross as the finale to this week of passionate religious excitement and

commitment and asking God what happened.

that was nailed to the cross is one of the few clear pieces of historical

evidence that we have.

The plaque, which

names him as Jesus, the King of the Jews, suggests that the charge on which

was executed was one of political insurrection, a threat to the Pax

But he's also now a victim of the Pax Romana.

In

the

year 51 of the Common Era, By the shores of the Aegean Sea, a visitor arrived at

the Greek city of Corinth.

His name was Paul of Tarsus.

Let's imagine Paul going up the main street of Corinth through the monumental

Roman archway into the Forum.

the center of city life, the place where all the business and most of the

political activities are done in the public life of this Greco -Roman city.

Here are the shops.

Here are the offices of the city magistrates.

And we are standing literally in the shadow of the great temple of Apollo.

Apollo, the sun god, watched over the fortunes of Corinth.

Like Zeus, Hera, Artemis, and Athena, Apollo was one of the Olympian gods,

family of divinities who presided over the ancient and diverse pagan universe.

Paganism is...

Our designation for what 90 -something percent of the people in the

Mediterranean were doing. Jews are a visible minority, and then everybody is

doing lots of other things.

One would have found a rich array of deities meeting the various needs of

individuals.

It's like going to a supermarket and being able to sort of shop for God.

And you have them at various times in your life and for various functions of

your living.

By the time Paul arrived in Corinth, pilgrims had been worshipping for

at local shrines, like the sacred spring of the Pirenne.

To devout pagans like these, Paul's message of a Jewish Messiah come to save

mankind, Jew and Gentile alike, must have seemed outlandish.

And so when we hear Paul say, I've determined to know nothing among you but

Jesus Christ, Jesus the Messiah, and him crucified, that must have struck an

interesting chord among these cosmopolitan Greeks who would have

Corinth at that time.

I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia.

educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous about God.

The Apostle Paul is, next to Jesus, clearly the most intriguing figure of

first century of Christianity, and far better known than Jesus, because he

all of those letters.

For as long as you eat this bread and drink the cup, You proclaim the Lord's

death until he comes.

Wait for his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead.

Whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, if there is anything

worthy of praise, think about these things.

We're beginning to get for the first time in the New Testament.

The language that will become the hallmark of all the later Christian

You see, it's Paul who starts the writing of the New Testament by writing

letters to these fledgling congregations in the cities of the Greek East.

Paul alludes in a number of his letters to the message that he would have

communicated verbally, probably.

He emphasizes two things. On the one hand, very clearly the importance of the

death and resurrection of Jesus.

On the other hand, he also emphasizes the importance of understanding the end

time and the immediacy of the end time and that one must be prepared for it.

the way one prepares for it is to be good.

We find a lot of ethics in Paul, and it's around this issue of how one lives

anticipation of the end time. It's just around the corner for Paul.

The death and resurrection of Jesus lie at the very heart of Paul's preaching.

But it is a story that predates Paul.

and goes back to the first followers of Jesus in Jerusalem.

Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his

own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock.

The movement that originated around Jesus must have suffered a traumatic

with his death.

Not so much that a Messiah couldn't die, but that nothing happened. The kingdom

didn't arrive immediately as they might have expected.

The effect that the crucifixion had on Jesus' followers was the desired effect

from the Roman perspective. That is, that people who were associated with

were terrified.

I mean, before the Easter proclamation, there must have been some kind of Easter

panic, you see, that folks were hiding out as they should have because now they

were accomplices of an executed criminal.

The followers of Jesus, who don't go away as they're supposed to when Pilate

does this, have to deal with that fundamental question.

What does this mean? That the one that we had all of these expectations about

has been crucified.

How do we deal with this, not merely the end of this life, but the shameful end

of this life?

The only place they can go eventually is into the Hebrew Scriptures, into their

tradition, and find out, is it possible that the elect one, the Messiah, the

righteous one, the holy one, any title they use of Jesus, is it possible that

such a one could be oppressed, persecuted, and executed?

They go into the Hebrew Scriptures, and of course what they find is that it's

almost like a job description of being God's righteous one, to be persecuted

even executed.

And the amazing thing is they said, hey, Pilate's right. He was the king of the

Jews.

And moreover, God has vindicated this claim that he is the king of the Jews by

raising him from the dead.

An angel of the Lord descending from heaven.

came and rolled back the stone.

He said to the women, Jesus, who was crucified, he has been raised.

Come, see the place where he lay.

The stories about the resurrection in the gospels make two very clear points.

First of all, that Jesus really, really was dead.

And secondly, that his disciples really and with absolute conviction saw him

again afterwards.

The Gospels are equally clear that it's not a ghost.

Even though the raised Jesus walks through a shut door and one of the

suddenly materializes in the middle of a conference his disciples are having.

He's at pains to assure them, touch me, feel me, it's bones and flesh.

And Luke, he eats a piece of fish.

A ghost can't eat fish.

As an historian, this doesn't tell me anything about whether Jesus himself was

actually raised. But what it does give me an amazing insight into is his

followers, and therefore indirectly into the leader who had forged these people

into such a committed community.

According to the Book of Acts, Christianity began at a single place, at

moment in time.

50 days after the death of Jesus, now known as Pentecost, a miraculous event

took place.

And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,

it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

Divided tongues as of fire appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each

them.

That's the picture that we get in Acts.

The historical reality is probably much more complex, and the

Christian movement probably began not from a single center, but from many

different centers where different groups of disciples of Jesus gathered and

tried to make sense of what they had experienced with him and what had

to him at the end of his public ministry.

The Acts account of early Christianity presents a very cogent, coherent image

earliest Christianity.

When in fact, the more we find out about early Christianity, the more wildly

variegated a phenomenon it appears to be.

As far as we can tell, the beginnings of Christianity

occurred in many different places, in many different groups.

There were wandering charismatics who went around from door to door preaching

without an ordinary occupation, depending on people with whom they

hospitality, for food.

There were settled groups in little towns.

There were radical groups.

trying to give up ordinary occupations and family life, following the teachings

of Jesus.

It must have been an amazing mixture, amazingly diverse range.

It's clear from the very beginning of Christianity that there are different

of interpreting the fundamental message.

There are different kinds of practice.

There are arguments over how Jewish are we to be.

How Greek are we to be?

How do we adapt to the surrounding culture?

What is the real meaning of the death of Jesus?

How important is the death of Jesus? Maybe it's the sayings of Jesus that are

really the important thing and not his death, not his resurrection.

I think we're right to call it the Jesus Movement here, because if we think of

it as Christianity, that is, from the perspective of the kind of movement and

institutional religion that it would become a few hundred years later, we

miss the flavor of those earliest years, of the kind of crude and rough

beginnings, the small enclave trying to keep the memory alive.

We're hampered by our vocabulary.

We know that this group will eventually form a Gentile community and they'll be

known as Christians. But this group didn't think that. This group expected

to return and establish the kingdom of God. He is a Jewish Messiah. They are

followers of a Jewish apocalyptic tradition. They are expecting the coming

the kingdom of God on earth. It's a Jewish movement.

The Jewish sect, then, is a group which sees itself as Jews, recognizes that

there are other Jews out there, but claims that those other Jews out there

it all wrong. They don't fully understand what Judaism is all about.

the members of the sect do.

Sectarian groups are always in tension with their environment.

That tension is manifested in a tendency to want to spread the message out, to

hit the road.

and convince others that the truth is real.

Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go

rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

One of the characteristics of the Roman Empire is there is suddenly great

freedom of movement, more so than in any period before that, and in some ways

more free than any period that will happen again until the invention of the

steamship.

As you go, proclaim the kingdom of heaven has come near.

One would have encountered on the Via Ignatia or any other major Roman road a

wonderful variety of journeyers. Some would be certainly engaged in commerce,

taking their commercial products from place to place. Some would be involved

goods and services, taking their particular services to different places.

would have found philosophers. One would have found persons such as Paul,

preachers, missionaries of particular religious views and religious movements.

What, in a sense, is sort of ironic is that the network that was established

the mobility of the Roman army finally became the network that was probably

instrumental in the spread of Christianity.

Jews had traveled along this network for centuries, and Jewish communities were

spread throughout the empire.

By the time of the first century, there were probably then, as now, more Jews

living outside the land of Israel than within the land of Israel.

There's a very energetic Jewish population in Babylon.

There is a very wealthy, vigorous Jewish population living in the major cities

around the Mediterranean.

It's because of diaspora Judaism, which is extremely well established, that

Christianity itself as a new and constantly improvising form of Judaism

is able to spread as it does throughout the Roman world.

Paul himself was a diaspora Jew.

Convinced that God had chosen him to spread the word about Jesus, he traveled

Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria.

Antioch has one of the largest Jewish communities outside of the Jewish

homeland. It's been suggested that it may be something like 40 ,000 people in

this Jewish community.

So we must imagine a number of different Jewish congregations and subsections of

the city in and through which Paul could have moved and still felt very much at

home within the Jewish community.

Wherever you have a sufficient number of Jews, you would have a Jewish

community. Wherever you have a Jewish community, you would have a Jewish

synagogue.

By the 4th century, the synagogue had become a formal place of worship.

But in Paul's day, especially in the Diaspora, it was more of a community

center.

Another remarkable feature of the synagogues in the Diaspora is not only

they attracted large crowds of people, but among these crowds will have been

Gentiles. There is no barrier between Jews and Gentiles, and Gentiles found

Jewish synagogue, and the Jews themselves, apparently, as open,

why not go to the Jewish synagogue?

Especially because there are no non -Jewish analogs. There's nothing

to this communal experience anywhere in pagan or Greek and Roman religions.

Gentiles attending synagogues would have been exposed to Judaism's variety of

beliefs.

In Antioch, this new Jewish sect, the Jesus movement, found a following in

synagogues.

Paul felt that the time was right for these Jews to bring the Gentiles into

their movement.

Paul's message of the conversion of Gentiles

seems to be predicated on the Isaiah language of what will happen when the

kingdom comes, when the Messiah has arrived, and there will be a light to

nations, a light to the Gentiles.

And in that sense, Paul views the Messianic age, having arrived

with Jesus, as being a window of opportunity.

for bringing in the Gentiles into the elect status alongside the people of

Israel.

Why do Gentiles join the movement?

There's this tremendous religious prestige, thanks to the antiquity of the

Jewish Bible.

By entering into the church, these Christians...

enter into that history as well. That's tremendously prestigious and important.

I think perhaps originally they were attracted to the claims of salvation,

regeneration, eternal life. You're baptized, you're illuminated.

Probably they were attracted to the rituals and to the communities.

Like most Jewish communities, the early followers of Jesus assembled for worship

in each other's homes.

Among the things that make Christians different are a couple of rituals which

they develop early on, before the very earliest sources that we have about

One of these is an initiation ceremony.

which they call baptism, which is simply a Greek word that means dunking.

The second major ritual which they develop is a meal, a common meal which

have together, which is designed as a memorial of the Last Supper which Jesus

had with his disciples.

Now the situation seems to be that initially, when people were attracted to

the Jesus movement, they first became Jews.

Becoming a Jew was no easy matter.

It meant conforming to strict Jewish laws.

This is the law to make a distinction between the unclean and the clean and

between the living creature that may be eaten and the living creature that may

not be eaten.

There are several issues involved here.

One is the notion of the dietary laws, the eating restrictions that would have

obtained for eating certain kinds of food if one was an observant Jew, also

with whom one could eat.

In Paul's view, it was now possible to allow Gentiles who didn't observe all

Jewish food laws to participate in the communal meals of the movement.

But because it's at a meal, It also runs headlong into some Jewish sensitivities

about what kind of food you can eat and with whom you can eat.

Dietary laws were not the only regulations that marked Jewish identity.

Every male among you shall be circumcised, and it shall be a sign of

covenant between me and you.

Of course, the major issues in converting to Judaism for a Gentile, for

-Jew, is that one must, if a male, become circumcised.

And, of course, this was an obvious distinction if one is working out in a

gymnasium where everyone was nude to begin with.

So the ritual of circumcision.

is one of those major hurdles that people would have thought about from the

Greek world.

Paul argued that the rite of baptism could replace circumcision.

This breakthrough allowed Gentiles to more freely join God's chosen people.

We now have, Paul says, a new map of the world.

The old distinctions between Jews and Gentiles are now obliterated. They have

now been supplanted by a new and truer and more wonderful and more beautiful

in which we have a new Israel that will embrace both Jews and Gentiles, all

those who now accept the new covenant and the new faith.

There is no longer Jew or Greek.

There is no longer slave or free.

There is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

And that would spark one of the most important controversies of the first

generation.

Do you have to become a Jew in order to be a follower of Jesus as the Messiah?

I went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas.

And I laid before the acknowledged leaders the gospel that I proclaim among

Gentiles.

Paul says explicitly that he went down to Jerusalem to meet with the leaders of

the church there. He calls them the pillars.

We have some names of people who must have been big shots in the movement.

Peter, James.

This James is not the James who's in the list of the apostles.

This James is the brother of the Lord.

It's somewhat surprising that we should hear of Jesus' own family members among

this earliest group in Jerusalem precisely because...

In the gospel, the family is usually portrayed as being antagonistic toward

public ministry. At one point in Mark's gospel, they think he's gone crazy, and

they try to take him away before he can do himself some harm.

And they go down to ask the question of how do we deal with these Gentile

converts?

And they manage to get some sort of rough agreement with the Jerusalem

leadership.

They agree that it's okay for Paul to convert these Gentiles and yet not to

force them to be circumcised.

As part of the compromise, Paul agreed to collect money from his Gentile

congregations to support the church in Jerusalem.

So when Paul goes back to Antioch, he seems to think that he's won a major

victory in the understanding of what the Christian message will be.

Shortly after his return to Antioch, however, Peter arrives from Jerusalem.

One of the most vivid episodes he sketches is in the Epistle to the

when he's talking about a face -off he and Peter have in Antioch.

A classic showdown in the history of earliest Christianity.

And Paul tells a story this way.

He says that in Antioch he encountered Peter.

who was having a meal with non -Israelite Jesus people.

Peter thought this was all right until a contingent for Jerusalem came.

And they tapped Peter on the shoulder, and Peter stopped attending these

banquets. And then we get a great passage of Esprit de l 'Escalier. It's

probably what Paul wishes he had thought to say to Peter at the time, but in the

letter it's presented as what he says to Peter. And he's yelling at Peter for

not being true to the gospel, not being true to Christ, and not being true to

this vision of things. And what he's really yelling at Peter about is food.

And the way Paul tells it is he says, well, you know, I confronted Peter

publicly. I told him he was a hypocrite. I told him off to his face. I told him

off in front of everybody.

End of story.

Well, the story doesn't really have an end.

We'd like Paul to tell us that after he told Peter off, he sort of skulked back

to Jerusalem with his tail between his legs, and then Paul gave James and his

party the what for, and then he threw him out or something like that. Nothing

like that. Paul's completely silent.

Now, this suggests to us that Paul had indeed had a showdown in Antioch.

He did face off with Peter.

He didn't win.

He didn't carry the day.

At least not that day.

So this suggests to us that James' party was influential and

influential outside its Jerusalem jurisdiction.

And that perhaps James' posse were there because they felt that their

authority should be exercised outside of the jurisdiction of Jerusalem.

The blow -up in Antioch over eating with Gentiles probably is the turning point

in Paul's career.

Paul left and went to Western Turkey, or Asia Minor, and Greece.

For the next ten years, From 50 to roughly 60, Paul will concentrate all of

efforts in this region of the Aegean Basin.

It's probably Ephesus and the areas immediately around Ephesus that will be

most important base of operations.

Ephesus was a cosmopolitan environment.

The inscriptions and the statues and the artwork and the buildings all tell us

that this is really a crossroads of culture and religious life throughout

Mediterranean world.

When you read Jesus' parables, you immediately think of agriculture.

You think of peasants, you think of landowners, you think of farming.

When you read Paul's letters, you think of the school, you think of the

philosopher, you think of the orator, you think of the city.

In Paul's view, at least, the city was the natural environment, if you will,

Christianity.

He had a way of coming back to the same city as a way of visiting new cities and

talking about visiting new cities. And it was cities that he was going to, not

just general geographical areas.

It's important to understand, I think, that it was from these cities that

Christianity ultimately was spread.

Hall mostly travels around in a kind of circuit of these congregations around

the Aegean Rim.

Or he sends out his helpers and his co -workers, people like Timothy and Titus,

to take information or check out what's happening over in Philippi or someplace

like that.

Sometimes perhaps even to go and help start a new congregation, someplace over

in, say, Colossae or maybe up toward the interior in Galatia.

So we have to imagine the Pauline mission.

as a kind of beehive of activity.

who was the first convert in Asia for Christ.

Greet Apelles.

Greet Ampliatus, my beloved in the Lord.

Greet Urbanus, our co -worker in Christ.

And my beloved Stachys.

The traditional view of the composition of the early Christian communities is

that they are from the proletariat.

Early Marxist interpreters of Christianity make a great to do with

movement of the proletariat.

It's essentially from the lowest classes.

But if you actually look at the book of Acts, and you look at Paul, and you

begin to collect the people who are named or identified in some way, here

have Erastus, the city treasurer of Corinth.

An ancient inscription with the name of Paul's follower Erastus can still be

seen in the ruins of Corinth.

You have Gaius of Corinth, whose home is big enough to let him be not only

Paul's host, but the host to all of the churches of Corinth. All of the little

household communities can meet in his house at one time.

You have Stephanus and his household, who have been hosts to the community.

You have Lydia in Philippi, who is the seller of purple goods, a luxury fabric.

You have Prisca and Aquila, and we wonder why the woman is usually

before her husband. She must be a woman of some consequence.

You begin to get the impression that you have quite a variety of different

social levels represented in these early Christian communities.

Not people at the absolutely top.

You have, with the exception possibly of Erastus, no one from the aristocratic

orders, no one who would be a member of the city council.

You have no agricultural slaves at the bottom of the hierarchy.

But in the rest of the social pyramid, everything in between, you seem to have

representatives in these early Christian groups.

So we begin to get a picture of...

upwardly mobile people, to use a modern anachronistic way of describing them,

people who have mixed status, who probably will be viewed by the

outside as nouveau riche, not people who don't quite belong, but in

their own eyes perhaps deserve more status than they're getting from the

society and have found within this community a role of leadership and a

which is recognized.

The worship of an early Christian house church probably centered around the

dinner table.

The term communion actually comes from this experience of the dining

We also know that all other aspects of worship that we think of as going with

early Christian practice probably happened around the dinner table as

Paul refers to one person having a song and another person bringing a prayer.

Everyone is contributing to the banquet, whether it's in the form of food or in

the form of their piety and worship.

Throughout the New Testament, particularly Paul's letters in the book

we find out that women owned the houses in which the early Christians met.

This, I think, is significant because I don't think the women who owned the

houses were simply providing coffee and cookies, in effect, for the Christian

community. I think that this probably gave them some avenue to power in actual

roles in the church.

Paul speaks of women as his fellow evangelists and teachers and patrons and

friends, as he does of men.

But I don't see a picture of a golden age of egalitarianism back there. I see

new...

unformed, diverse and threatened movement which allowed a lot more

women in certain roles for a while in some places and not in others.

Paul's way of building a community was just one of the many interpretations of

the Jesus movement.

He had to fight a running battle to keep his fledgling congregations from

falling under the influence of rival preachers.

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?

His relationship with these folks is not entirely unproblematic.

For one thing, he's got to manage a long -distance relationship, and we all know

how difficult that is.

And he has to do this by letter.

In his letters, he's often recapitulating for the recipients fights

prior to the fights he's having currently with his congregation.

The early Christians did have turf wars over who had it right.

And you see this from the very beginning.

The Apostle Paul, his opponents in Galatia, say, wait a minute, if you're

going to be a real Christian, first you have to be a real Jew, and that means

you have to be circumcised, and you have to keep certain regulations out of the

Torah.

So Paul has not got it right.

Paul has to say, no, you don't understand how radically new this thing

God is doing here.

Paul preached the imminent arrival of God's kingdom on earth and salvation for

those converted to Jesus.

You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.

Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.

It's clear that one of the concerns that keeps showing up throughout this period

of Paul's ministry is, when is this kingdom going to arrive?

What's going to happen? How soon?

They are still 25 years after the fact, anticipating the imminent return of

Christ and the imminent arrival of the kingdom. And it's this kind of...

Don't slow me down with the facts.

Impatience and energy that we get in Paul's letters.

Paul's very first letter, the earliest single writing that we have in the New

Testament, is 1 Thessalonians. And already in 1 Thessalonians, Paul is

console them when people are starting to die within the congregation and the

kingdom hasn't arrived yet.

Paul believed the earthly world order was about to change, that time was

out, and the end was at hand.

Clearly, the message about the coming end time was the part that would have

threatening to a Roman official and would have been threatening to any

native population that had vested some authority in Roman officialdom.

Paul attacked those who preferred peace and security to the coming kingdom of

God.

When they say there is peace and security, then sudden destruction will

upon them.

Scholars have wondered who this people is who are saying peace and security.

Some interpreters think that it's the first lapsed Christians. They're no

serious about the end time coming immediately.

I tend to think, though, that it refers to those who are supportive of the

imperial rule, the peace and security of Augustan and imperial

governance.

Paul is saying those who are on the side of Augustus will reach their end first.

Divine wrath will come upon them first.

So Paul is very...

clearly drawing here a remarkable antithesis between the rule of the

the one hand and the rule of God, the kingdom of God on the other hand.

Apocalyptic expectations were fueling political turmoil throughout Judea.

Jewish resistance to Roman rule was growing daily.

The situation in Jerusalem was becoming increasingly tense through the mid -60s

also.

Josephus tells us that there was growing tension over the last few governors of

the countryside.

He tells us that they were pretty abusive and corrupt administrators,

the people, as it were, in order to line their own pockets.

Josephus also tells us that there's another source of growing tension in the

country at this time because there's an increasing number of bandit and rebel

types coming out of the woodwork in the country.

And so between growing banditry, the rise of the zealot movement, a

active insurgency movement, and then the corruption of the administration,

The situation in Jerusalem is becoming very, very tense indeed.

In the year 60 of the Common Era, after a decade building communities in the

Greek East, Paul decided that his work there was done.

Now, with no further place for me in these regions, I am going to Jerusalem

ministry to the saints.

Paul wants to fulfill the promise that he had made to Peter and James back in

the Jerusalem conference.

For these ten years that he's been in the Aegean, he's had his congregations

collecting monies together to take back to Jerusalem.

Now we find him gathering all that up, each congregation sending an emissary

with their part of the contribution.

And they're all going as an entourage to lay it at the feet of James in

Jerusalem.

I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of

Christ.

What seems to have happened is when he went back to Jerusalem with the

contribution, he was arrested.

as some sort of rabble -rouser.

According to the Book of Acts, Paul was taken to Rome to stand trial before the

emperor.

Within a short span of time, the leading figures of the early Jesus movement

were wiped out.

The tradition holds that Peter and Paul both died in about the year 64.

About the same time, Josephus tells us that James, brother of Jesus,

at Jerusalem has also been killed, all in about the same two or three year

period.

With the passing of this first generation, the expectation that all of

those coming events must be close at hand, probably was a concern for a lot

people.

In the year 66 of the Common Era, Jewish resistance broke out into open conflict

against Rome.

The rebels seized Jerusalem.

The first Jewish revolt had begun.

Truly the battle is thine.

Their bodies are crushed by the might of thy hand, and there is no man to bury

them.

It seemed that the fiery predictions of the Essenes were about to come true.

Most people in the first revolt really thought it was the apocalyptic event. It

was the coming of a new kingdom on earth.

Several of the leaders within the revolt really claimed to have messianic

identity or prophetic identity.

They shall be a flaming torch in the straws to consume ungodliness.

True to their beliefs, the Essenes marched out to fight the Romans and were

annihilated.

Even many Christians.

thought that the war was the actual apocalyptic event.

Valiant warriors of the angelic host are among our numbered men, and the hero of

war is with our congregation.

A prisoner of war who defected to the Roman side, the Jewish historian

personally witnessed the sack of Jerusalem.

Josephus describes walking around the walls of Jerusalem and pleading with

people on the inside to give up rather than go through the suffering and agony

that would come from a long protracted siege.

For two years then, Jerusalem was under siege.

Starvation, disease, murder were the order of the day.

The loss of life must have been catastrophic to the Jewish population as

whole.

By the month of August in the year 70, the fate of Jerusalem was a foregone

conclusion.

The Roman armies were massed. They were ready to break through. Everyone knew

it. It was just a matter of when.

But they were going to fight to the death, and many of them did die.

So on that fateful morning when they broke through, Josephus describes the

events of them breaking through the walls, the Roman soldiers running

the streets, going into every house.

Pouring into the alleys, sword in hand, they massacred indiscriminately all whom

they met and burned the houses of all who had taken refuge within.

running everyone through who fell in their way.

They clogged the alleys with corpses and drowned the whole city in blood.

The dead bodies of natives and aliens, of priests and laity, were mingled in a

mass, and the blood of all manner of corpses formed pools in the courts of

It's a pretty awful slaughter.

And we have lots of evidence of it now, between the artifacts that one finds of

the first revolt that are scattered throughout this layer of the

record. Arrowheads, spears, other kinds of indications of pretty serious hand

-to -hand combat at all parts of the city.

Towards evening, they ceased the slaughter.

But as night fell, the fire gained the mastery, and the dawn broke in flames

upon Jerusalem.

One of the most recent and poignant examples of this comes from the

something called the burnt house, which actually shows us one of the houses that

apparently was burned during this.

All of the furniture and the implements are here in place, with the layer of ash

and residue of the burning still quite clear.

The Romans set the temple on fire.

All that was left was the platform wall that once supported the symbol of the

center of the nation of Israel.

Roman troops sacked the temple and carried off the sacred symbols of

Jerusalem, the sacred city.

the temple, the center of piety and identity, is gone.

It's very important that we remember that up to and through the first revolt,

Christians are still part of Judaism.

And the revolt and its aftermath is just the beginning of a split.

as each group tries to rethink its earlier traditions in the light of the

failure of the first revolt.

We have to imagine the refugees fleeing from the burning ruins of Jerusalem.

And as they look back at the smoke rising against the horizon, They might

remembered the words of the psalm from the first destruction back in the time

the Babylonian exile.

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.

Next time, the Romans expected to make an assault upon the fortress Masada,

which they did. The end of Jewish resistance to Rome. The failure of the

revolt really was a traumatic event for everyone living in the Jewish homeland,

Jews and Christians alike.

As a result, they had to start rethinking their own assumptions.

And the beginning of the Gospels.

I am the light of the world.

He who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of

The Gospels are very peculiar types of literature.

They're not biographies.

They're a kind of religious advertisement.

What they do is proclaim their individual authors' interpretation of

Christian message.

Telling and retelling stories about Jesus.

Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?

And they were filled with awe, and they said to one another, Who is this then,

that the wind and seas obey him?

And it is the story of the broken relationship between Jews and

But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds

against the brothers.

Luke is reflecting the development of the Christian movement more away from

Jewish roots.

and the conflict between the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of God.

could be arrested simply because they bore the name Christianos.

That was enough under Roman convention to convict one of a capital crime.

Next time on From Jesus to Christ, The First Christian, on Frontline.

Frontlines, From Jesus to Christ, The First Christians, is available on DVD.

To order, visit shoppbs .org or call 1 -800 -PLAY -PBS.