2.6 Jewish History - After Jesus

Welcome, listeners. In this arc of episodes, we have been looking at a summary of the history of the Jews, because it is the Jewish community who wrote the Bible you read, and it is their history and perspective that serve as the backdrop for your Bible. Understanding requires context, and that means that reading the Bible requires having some grasp of Jewish history. 

This is now episode 2.6, and we will finish up this arc today by talking about Jesus and his ministry, the expectations of his disciples, the different trajectories of the Jews and of the spin-off group called the Christians, and about the part of the Bible that we call the New Testament. 

I’d like to start today’s discussion with a look at the word Messiah. First century Judaism and the birth of the Christian story make little sense until you know what a messiah was. Messiah is a Hebrew word that literally means “anointed one”. In the Israelite or Jewish culture, an anointing was the act of placing oil on the head of a special person who was believed to be set apart by God. This was most prominently true of a king, but it also applied to high priests. Part of the initiation ritual to become a king or high priest was to receive oil poured on one’s head. 

You may have recently seen the televised coronation ceremony of King Charles III at Westminster, and as part of that ceremony, he was anointed with oil. This part of the ceremony took place behind screens, unseen by the audience, because the idea is that the anointing is the sacred moment at which God himself designated Charles to be the king.

So, a messiah is a person anointed by God, typically a king. The Greek translation of “anointed one” or “messiah” is “Khristos” or, in English, Christ. So when you hear “Jesus Christ”, it is, at a basic level, a designation of kingship. Christ the King. 

Let’s delve for a moment into what the Jews meant when they used the word Messiah in the first century and what they believed about a messiah. As we’ve discussed for several episodes running, the history of the Jews up to this point was primarily one of oppression. Ever since their rather short-lived kingdoms had been wiped out, they had been subjugated by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and now Romans. And this long history–about 600 years–of sorrow and oppression and injustice posed an existential problem for the Jewish people. They were supposed to be special. They had been given promises by God. God had anointed David and his descendants to be their kings. They believed God had favored them with a temple and laws and a priesthood, but their glory days were long gone and, in the first century, they found themselves ruled by emperors from Rome. So, what gives? 

They could have given up on their history and the supposed favor and promises of God, and some did, assimilating into Greek ways of thinking. But, many clung to the idea that if things seemed bad now, it didn’t mean God had abandoned them forever. Maybe in the future God intended to rescue them, to deliver them, to ransom them, redeem them, to bring them salvation–understanding all of these terms in a political sense. Maybe God intended to restore the Jewish kingdom in the future. And, maybe God intended to send a person–an anointed person, a messiah–to come to the rescue. 

So, when Jews in the first century were living in expectation of a messiah, they primarily had in mind that they would get their kingdom back and that they wouldn’t be oppressed any more. The Romans would go away, and they would have a new king to sit on the throne of their nation, just as God had promised once upon a time to King David almost 1,000 years before. That is the most important sense in which to understand a messiah. And many a poor, oppressed Jew in the first century lived wondering when the new king would show up and who it would be. 

For many, though, there were added dimensions to this idea of messiah. He wouldn’t be just a political figure, but his coming kingdom would have a spiritual dimension, too. After all, the restoration of the Jews’ kingdom would necessarily, in the minds of pious Jews, be a restoration of God’s kingdom, too. They were one and the same. And to be part of God’s kingdom meant returning to faithfulness to the Jewish Torah laws. Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Now, remember back that the Persians had ruled the Jews for centuries and that Persian ideas and religion had spread when Alexander united east and west under his vast empire. Part of Persian religion was a clear belief in a coming savior who would win a final battle of good versus evil and make the earth new and good, free of evil. This more cosmic version of a messiah had made its way into the minds of some Jews, too, by the first century. Some believed the messiah they should be expecting was not only political and local, but he would bring final and worldwide judgment on the living and the dead. An earthly king, definitely, but maybe, in addition, a cosmic judge.

Most of the world, not just the Jews and the Persians, were in search of a savior, by the way–someone to bring peace, justice, virtue, and love to a world that too-often seemed violent, unjust, corrupt, and cruel. And, of course whether Roman, Egyptian, Greek, or Jew, or whatever, they typically expected their earthly ruler to bring that sort of salvation. Thus, we have famous inscriptions in which, for example, the coming of Emperor Augustus was called “the gospel” or the good news, because his reign brought peace, prosperity, and order. Augustus was the savior who was annointed, therefore a “christ” and lord. These ideas pre-existed our association of these titles with a person called Jesus. 

Bottom line for our history survey: many Jews in the first century thought a new king was coming for them and that his reign would bring salvation from oppression. At base, that is the meaning of the coming messiah. 

_____

Next, let’s talk for a moment about Jesus. This podcast seeks to bring biblical scholarship to those who haven’t been exposed to much of that. Many who thump the Bible are generally skeptical about scholars’ views, but be aware that scholars are virtually unanimous in their conclusion that there absolutely was a historical figure called Jesus from Nazareth who lived and died in the early first century. Much of what can be known about Jesus comes from what was written about him later in the first century.

He had a following in Galilee and Judea, he preached a message about “the kingdom” (which we’ve just been discussing), and he was crucified around the year 30 AD after getting himself in trouble with the authorities who accused him of claiming to be the King of the Jews, which was not an okay thing to claim to be during Roman times. And, mind you again, King of the Jews was a title equivalent to messiah in Hebrew or Christ in Greek.

Future episodes will deal more with Jesus, his life and his teaching–needless to say, he’s a critical figure in a podcast about the Bible–but let’s, for now, move on to the effect he had on the history of the Jews and the emergence of the Christians. 

For most Jews of the time, Jesus was frankly inconsequential–just another preacher with delusions of grandeur and a messianic message. There were, apparently, quite a number of such people in the Greco-Roman period. The late first century Jewish historian Josephus lists more than a dozen Jewish messiahs who claimed kingship or led armed rebellions as anointed men of god, fighting for the Kingdom they thought was imminent. Among these were Judas Gamala who revolted against the census and tax of 6 AD we mentioned last week, Theudas, who is mentioned in the 5th chapter of Acts, and Bar Kokhba, who we will talk more about in a moment. 

Jewish resentment against Rome became quite heated at times. The party of the Zealots, in particular, would, from time to time, react violently to Roman intervention in Jewish life and religious practice. In fact, there were three major wars fought between Jews and Romans during the century or so after the life of Jesus, collectively and aptly known to historians as the Jewish-Roman Wars. 

The first Jewish-Roman war took place between 66 and 73 AD, and the result was that the Jewish rebels were crushed, many Jews were slaughtered, particularly during sieges at Jerusalem and at the hilltop fortress of Masada, and in the year 70, about midway through the war, a major turning point in Jewish history occurred when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. This was the grand temple that had been built relatively recently by Herod the Great, a replica of Yahweh’s Temple that was built in the 10th century BC.

The second of the Jewish Roman wars is also called the Kitos war, and it mostly took place among the Jewish diaspora living in North Africa, Egypt, Cyprus, and even in Mesopotamia. Lasting from 115-117, it represented another major defeat of the Jews.

The third and final war is called the Bar Kokhba War, after a man named Simon Bar Kokhba, who claimed to be the messiah, or anointed king of God. He rebelled against the Romans after, Under the Emperor Hadrian, the ruined city of Jerusalem had been re-established as a thoroughly Roman city, complete with a temple to Jupiter on the site of the former Yahweh temple. Bar Kokhba’s revolt against this act led to the four-year conflict from 132-136 AD that, in the end, proved the most devastating of all defeats for the Jews. The Romans would suffer no more revolts, so they slaughtered, enslaved, and expelled the remaining Jews from Judea. 

Following these revolts, the Jewish religion and culture forever changed. For one thing, with no temple, there could be no sacrifices as prescribed in the Bible. The priesthood was out of business, so the most important leaders became the teachers of the law called rabbis, and Jewish life re-focused from the Jerusalem temple to the many scattered local synagogues as the center of cultural and religious life. Having suffered terribly for their misguided beliefs about a coming king and the rebellions they inspired, any further talk of a messiah among the Jews was of a spiritual, not a political nature, if the idea of a messiah was entertained at all.

_____

Now, back to the Christian trajectory following the crucifixion of Jesus. Very quickly, let’s affirm that Jesus was Jewish and his disciples were Jewish. Thoroughly so. Jesus’s followers believed he was the messiah, the expected king who was supposed to restore justice and the earthly kingdom of the Jews. But, he got in trouble and was executed by the Romans, and therefore did not restore the kingdom of the Jews. So, by definition, he could not have been the messiah. 

Except that, even after his death, many among his followers claimed that, no, he really was the messiah. They believed that he had been resurrected from the dead and, shortly thereafter, he had been taken up to heaven, which explained why he wasn’t still alive and on earth. Further, though, they also believed that, as the messiah, he still had unfinished business and so would come back in the near future. When he didn’t come back in the near future, the idea of messiahship among the Christians shifted because it had to. The kingdom of God became cosmic, ethical, spiritual and connected to the future afterlife of individuals rather than to the future political fortunes of the Jewish people.  

This redefinition was critical for the appeal of Christianity beyond Judaism because, at the end of the day, while its founders and foundations were Jewish, Christianity, already within a few decades of its inception, was primarily a Gentile–that is, non-Jewish–enterprise. For the most part, the Jews just didn’t buy into the Jesus-as-redefined-messiah story, and the story found more purchase as a sort of mystery-like religion among non-Jews. Christianity moved further and further from Judaism and its rituals and laws to the point that the Jews were soon, in general, seen as totally separate, rejected by God, and even blamed for the death of Jesus instead of the Romans who crucified him, a shift easily perceived in the progression of early Christian writings. 

Tradition has it that Jesus’s core group of disciples, the twelve apostles, became traveling evangelists and spread the good news of resurrection and redemption to other parts of the Near East and Mediterranean. An educated Jew named Paul, who had a thorough familiarity with Greek philosophy, became one of the earliest traveling Christian missionaries and a prolific writer, founding communities in Turkey and Greece who believed in the resurrection of Jesus, his message of loving service, and his imminent return. These communities were called churches, or those called into an assembly from the original Greek word ekklesia. More on Paul in a moment. 

While the Romans were severely crushing Jewish rebellions, they also, at times, persecuted Christians for failing to properly revere the emperor, for being generally anti-social, and for subverting social order, among other reasons. Christians were novel and suspicious. There were a few widespread persecutions, and a number of local ones between the first and fourth centuries AD, and many leading Christians were martyred, killed, for their stubborn faith, including, according to tradition, most of the apostles, Peter and Paul among them. 

Once all of the apostles had died off, there came the period of the church fathers, Christian leaders who were entrusted, generation after generation, to keep passing along the teachings of the apostles as witnesses of Christ. To make a long story short, Christianity was quite a varied and non-standardized religion until we get to the 4th Century AD. In the early 300s, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and, to maintain order in his empire, required that Christians come together to standardize their beliefs and their writings, as we saw back in episode 1.2. 

This overview is seriously skimming the surface, but since this is an arc of episodes about Jewish history, let’s leave the early Christian story there for now. 

_____

Now let’s finally talk about the New Testament. The New Testament consists of 27 books and, remarkably, this is agreed whether you are Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. Though, the debates in early Christianity about which books would be in the New Testament and which would not did last for centuries.

You are accustomed to starting the New Testament with the four gospels–the books called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But, those were not the earliest of the New Testament books written. The earliest were Paul’s letters written starting roughly 20 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, around the year 50 AD. Between 50 and the early 60s, Paul wrote I Thessalonians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians, Romans, Philippians and Philemon, all of them letters. Next came the first of the gospels, or mini-biographies about Jesus, in around the year 70, which was actually Mark. Matthew and Luke, and the sequel to Luke called Acts, likely date to the 80s. And, John, the fourth gospel–and a very different sort of gospel compared to the other three–was likely written in the 90s. Revelation, which is the last book in your table of contents and a very trippy text, is also likely from the 90s. 

Letters attributed to Paul but likely not by Paul himself–more on that in future episodes–were written starting in the 70s and likely all the way up until the mid-second century, and these included Ephesians, Colossians, the controversial book of Hebrews, II Thessalonians, I and II Timothy, and Titus. Other New Testament letters that we call the general epistles, attributed to authors other than Paul, include James and I Peter, likely written in the late first century, and I, II, and III John, Jude, and II Peter, all probably from the first half of the second century. 

All of the New Testament books were written in Greek and primarily for an audience living outside of Palestine. Many of them draw on themes from the Jewish writings we call the Old Testament and/or make reference to passages from Old Testament texts. The early Christians would have viewed them as a continuity of Jewish writing or at least building on the foundation of the Jewish scriptures. 

A side note that while it took until the 4th century AD for the Christians to determine their “final” version of the Old Testament–final that is, until the Orthodox added a few more books and the Protestants subtracted seven about 1200 years later–the Jewish rabbis had likely determined their fixed list of books by around the year 200 AD.  

Okay, that will wrap up this arc of episodes. So much information, I realize! Thanks for hanging in there if you managed to. Hopefully having some sense of the unfolding story of the Jews and the Christian offshoot gives you greater context for reading the Bible. I can’t imagine, personally, trying to make sense of any Bible reading without knowing what was going on in the world of the ancient writers and readers. And, yet, in so many pulpits and home devotionals, folks just read without much interest in the context that explains the texts. 

So, next week, we will do our second Q and A episode to cap this arc, with some audience questions and my friend JT joining me for a sort-of interview format. I hope you tune in and enjoy that. Please email your questions. 

As always, thanks for listening and for sharing with your friends. Less thumping. More understanding. See you next time.