Lecture

Dr. James M. Grier:

We are privileged to have with us the provost of Columbia Bible College and Seminary, Dr. Terry Hulbert. Dr. Hulbert holds a doctorate from Dallas Theological Seminary, has taught in the United States and Canada, had a 15-year career in missions in theological education, and presently is the provost of our fine sister school in Columbia. We welcome you, sir, and trust that this time in these classes will be a profit to you and to the students.

Dr. Terry C. Hulbert:

The life of the Lord Jesus Christ—I can personally think of no greater privilege than to think through and study through and to teach a course on the life of the Lord Jesus Christ here on earth.

We will be seeking to achieve certain objectives. We will be tracing the events and statements involved in Jesus’ life and a logical and chronological progression. Usually, we study a Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, but we don’t always tie these together, fold them in together—integrate them. And that’s what we’ll be doing in this course. We’ll be doing it in a logical and chronological order, and I think this will give us some insights that we don’t normally see. We’ll try to perceive the significance of the words of the Lord Jesus Christ and His works. We’ll keep these two words in mind: His words and His works. We want to understand some of the present implications of the basic truths. We don’t want to leave all of this back there in history. We want to move it up into our present day.

Then, I believe that as we, as the disciples, came close to the Lord Jesus Christ, that this study should have, and I believe will have, an impact on our lives personally. The approach that we’ll be using is what I call the “Reporter/analyst Approach”: Who? What? Where? When? and Why? I think this will be helpful because we want to get into the sandals of the people who were actually there. We want to feel ourselves into their situation and pretend that we’re actually sitting at the feet of Jesus or in the boat with Him or walking in the path with Him or wherever.

For instance, who is involved in a particular scene is very important. Who’s involved in that event? Who is being spoken to? Who’s in the audience? In what way is this person or this audience significant? For instance, there’s much discussion on the Sermon on the Mount. What’s the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount? Well, in order to understand that, we must realize who is in that audience. We’ll be looking at that. What is said? What is actually taking place? What’s the key concept of what is being taught? We’ll notice this in some of the discourses of Christ. And, for instance, in the Beelzebub incident in Matthew 12, what does it mean when they said, “You are doing these things by the power of Beelzebub”? What was actually happening in that event? And then where does the action occur? Is it in the open? Is it in a town? Is it in a synagogue? Is it in Galilee or Jerusalem? And we must keep in mind that Galilee was very different from Jerusalem in its ethos, its people, its orientation, its atmosphere, and so on. Galilee, for instance, was more open; it was called, “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Traders went through there. It was far less religiously oriented because the temple was down in Jerusalem, and that was the one place of worship. There were hundreds of synagogues. But Jerusalem was the place of political power. It was the place of religious power. And so, where Jesus was when He made His statement—in a temple or by the shore of the Sea of Galilee—is of course important.

Then, when does the action occur? One of the things we’ll discover in this course is that as we move through the life of Christ, we see great changes taking place in the attitudes of the crowds and the relationship of Jesus to people and to His teaching. He doesn’t teach always the same thing all the way for three and a half years. What He teaches at the end of His ministry, or two-thirds of the way through, is different in emphasis from what he taught at the very beginning. Similarly, the crowds change. Often we hear the statement: “The Jews rejected Jesus” or “The religious leaders rejected him.” This wasn’t always true. And it wasn’t universally true. There was a pattern to their reaction to Jesus.

As a matter of fact, at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, many of the religious leaders were just mystified. They were just miffed. They were bewildered. And finally, of course, this did harden into a rejection. But I want us to see the progression in this. And so, when Jesus says something in His ministry is important. For instance, the Sermon on the Mount is the first of the discourses. And in the Sermon on the Mount, He says certain general things about entrance into the kingdom. And it relates to what was going on right at that time. The Olivet Discourse, given just three days before the crucifixion, of course, speaks of something entirely different.

And then when the action occurs can even be related to a very local incident. For instance, in Matthew 15 when Jesus went up to Sidon and there was a Gentile woman who pled that her daughter would be healed, and He wouldn’t answer her. And she said, “Son of David, have mercy!” And he wouldn’t answer her. Then they got into a discussion about bread and the bread being thrown to the dogs and so on. When did that occur? It occurred immediately after Jesus had given the discourse on the Bread of Life and talking there about Him as the Bread of Life being rejected. And that had taken place the day after the feeding of the 5,000. I believe this is the sequence here that’s important.

And then the question: Why? Actually, this “why” applies to all of them. In other words, why was it important? Why was this event important in terms of to whom He was speaking and about whom He was speaking and so on? But in a broader sense, why is this incident, this discourse, this teaching, this miracle, why is this significant in the ministry of Christ? What implications are involved for us?

We’ll be using the text of Thomas and Gundry, which is The Harmony of the Gospels. And in this Harmony of the Gospels, you’ll see that there are columns, which bring together the teaching or the incidents at any given moment. And I would ask that you peruse this, and you’ll notice that not only do we have the text of the Gospels all through here, but you also have some good notes at the back, some discourses on various matters and also some maps. So, we’ll be using that. And when I refer to section numbers, rather than give all of the references for a given incident—maybe in two, three, or four Gospels—I’ll just give a section number, and that’s the section in Thomas and Gundry. It’s sort of a shorthand way of referring to a certain passage. Everett Harrison [will provide] background materials. It is very, very good on the transfiguration and other items you’ll be reading in that.

We will not discuss any chronological aspects in the life of Christ. Dr. Harold W. Hoehner’s excellent book, that you see listed in the bibliography, will give us the background, for instance, on the number of days that Jesus was in the tomb and the time of the birth of Christ and these various matters.

I would like to move on now to the historical background of the life of Christ, and this is extremely important because a great change took place between the two Testaments. In the 400 years, approximately, between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, there are fantastic changes that took place in Palestine. For instance, you cannot just put the events of the life of Christ back into the days of Malachi or into the days of the Persian Empire. They just don’t fit. These were probably 400 of the most active years in all of history until our recent day.

For instance, at the end of the Old Testament, we find the Persian Empire covering the whole world. The Persians were in control. And we ended up with Nehemiah, who is the writer of the last historical book in the Old Testament, and Nehemiah himself was working in the Persian government. And then Malachi was in Jerusalem prophesying and calling the people to repentance back from some of their sins. And then we have 400 years in which we have no message from heaven, and we move on until the time of Christ. And a number of things took place there, and especially the impact of two great world empires. One of them was the Greek Empire and the other was the Roman Empire.

You’ll notice that we move from Babylon to Persia and then to Egypt and Syria as controlling Palestine. How did this come about? Well, it came about because of the conquest of Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great came to power about 334 BC in Macedon—that is about a little over 300 years before the birth of Christ—in upper and northern Greece. And Philip of Macedon, for whom the city of Philippi was named—became famous later in Paul’s epistle— moved on in blitzkrieg through the whole eastern world. And in the space of just about three and a half years, he conquered the whole of the Middle East. Can you imagine this sort of thing happening today? He moved from Philippi over to Granikos (which is near Troy), won a battle there. He moved on down through into Asia Minor and back through down to Egypt, bypassing Palestine, down to Alexandria (Alexandria Egypt was named after him) at the mouth of the Nile. And then, he moved back up to the north. He came through Jerusalem—that is, nearby Jerusalem—he came through Palestine. But he did no harm to the Jews. He didn’t try to conquer them in any way. And he was actually a friend to Israel. There were no problems with Alexander or the Greeks.

He moved on up then to Persia and finally fought a determining battle at Arbela in 331 BC and that crushed the Persian Empire. From there, he moved on over to India and came back complaining that there were no more worlds to conquer. He died just a very few years after that, and as he died he left no heirs. Of course, that brought up the situation of his succession. Here he had conquered this whole world. But as he had conquered it, he left no one to carry on and to govern it. He was what we call today, a strong natural leader. He could operate the whole thing by himself. But he did not have anybody that he could leave it to. And, of course, that determined much of the history, the background, of the life of Christ.

There’s one factor I should mention here about Alexander’s conquest, which is very significant especially for the life of Christ at that particular period. Alexander would have made a tremendous missionary. He really believed in the Greek ethos. He believed in Greek culture. He believed in Greek philosophy. He believed in the Greek way of life. And his whole purpose in life was not just to conquer a world. But his whole purpose in life was “to make the world Greek!” He really wanted to make everybody like himself and like the Greeks. This is quite an undertaking. But he succeeded in this probably more than any other civilization in such a short period of time. For instance, the Persians never did make all of the Middle East Persian. The Romans never did Romanize, although they had a tremendous influence (and we’re influenced by them today) over a long period of time. But in such a short period of time, he actually tried to Hellenize the whole world.

For instance, he would have his soldiers marry local girls. They would have children who would grow up speaking Greek. And so Greek was spoken throughout the whole of this Middle East. This, of course, is the background of the distribution of the New Testament and the reason why it was written in Greek. But he did something else. As he moved into all of these places, he precipitated a reaction, especially on the part of Jews, for or against Greek culture, because Greek culture was obviously diametrically opposed to Jewish culture. For instance, one of the main tenets of Greek religion and philosophy was their polytheism: many, many gods. And after the exile into Babylon, the Jews were very, very sensitive on this matter. They realized that they were put into the exile in Babylon because of their worshiping many gods. And they were so struck with monotheism when they came back from the exile that they weren’t going to mess around with that again. As a matter of fact, one of their big complaints against Jesus is because He made Himself a God. So there was tremendous tension here in this situation.

As the Greeks moved then—as the followers of Alexander moved into Palestine—they precipitated an earthquake, we might say, sociologically and especially religiously, because they were trying to make people who were monotheists into polytheists; and not only that, but [tried to get them to adapt] the whole Greek culture. Now, as you know, the word gymnasium comes from gymnos, which means to be naked. And they would go naked or almost naked into their games. Well, this was against Jewish standards. And as they moved throughout the country in Palestine, everywhere there was a reaction against them. We’ll see more of that in just a few minutes. But basically, the reactions against this Greek attempt to enculturate the people resulted in the various parties at the time of Christ; and Jesus came into that situation, as we will see.

I think we better take just a little bit more detail on this. I want to go through it quickly first and then come back into a little bit of fine-tuning.

The next thing that happened after Alexander died was that two of his generals took over the Middle East. The Seleucids and the Ptolemies were those who were influenced by the Seleucid family, which came from one of his generals who centered at Antioch. As a matter of fact, there was a line of kings known as the family of Antioch (Antiochus I, Antiochus IV, and so on). And these were in the northern part of the Middle East. They went down to about Damascus and from there north into what we call Turkey today and Armenia and over into Persia. And they took that whole northwestern portion of the Middle East.

The Ptolemies, under General Ptolemy, took over the lower part, which included Palestine at first and then down into Egypt. And so, we separate the whole of the Middle East then; it was divided between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. Now we date that from about 323 BC, which is the time of Alexander’s death.

What we’re interested in is the control of Palestine. In other words, who was in control of Palestine, who was influencing that? Because that’s where the events of the life of Christ take place. The Ptolemies controlled it at first. They were favorable to the Jews. They gave them no hard times. They didn’t try to make them Greeks. (Incidentally, the word for Greece is hellas, and the term to make Greek is to hellenize.) And so, they did not try to Hellenize. Particularly, they more or less left the Jewish people alone. And they controlled that area until 198 BC. And that’s a turning point, because in 198 BC the Seleucids defeated the Ptolemies at the Battle of Banias. Banias is what we know as Caesarea Philippi in the New Testament record. We’ll see that later on. And it’s at the foot of Mount Hermon on the south side, in the north part of Palestine. And they defeated the Ptolemies. As a result, the Seleucids poured in and took control of Jerusalem and Judea, and they were Hellenizers. They were very, very hard on the Jews. For about 30 years, they put tremendous pressure on the Jews to become Greeks. And this is where we get into all of the naked activity in their gymnasium, in their athletic events, their theater, their religion, and so on. And this was very, very hard on the Jews.

As a result of this, in 167 there was a revolt called the Maccabean Revolt. The details of this are very interesting as how this family of Maccabees killed one who was willing to pay tithes to a priest that was sent out by the Seleucids and so on. But down near the coast, down at a little place called Modein, they took control. That is, these Maccabees—what we would call Freedom Fighters today, patriots—they took control of the situation and eventually moved into Jerusalem. In 164 BC, they took Jerusalem and cleansed the temple, and that is the beginning of Chanukah, which celebrates the cleansing of the temple.

Now, you say, what’s all this got to do with the life of Christ? It has a great deal to do with the life of Christ because there was no king. There had been no king in Israel since Zedekiah was taken away in chains in 586 BC to Babylon. They had had no government. They had had no real political power. But now in 165–164 BC for the first time they began to have political power. But who had the political power? The titular head was the high priest. The high priest now became very important. As a matter of fact, the high priest was so important in Israel after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC, that I and II Chronicles were written by Ezra to establish the concept of the priests in the temple worship because that now became the center focus rather than the monarchy. So the priesthood now takes over, and especially the high priest. And over the next few years there was tremendous competition as to who should be the high priest. It became a political office. It wasn’t religious at all, hardly. It became a very strong political office, and there were two lines, two competing people. And finally, the infighting and the disestablishment, we might say, of the country; because of this desire of one high priest to get power against the other high priest and so on, the Romans moved in.

The Romans had become powerful and had more or less moved in and had influence in the eastern Mediterranean by this time. The Romans moved in. And in 63 BC, they took over all of Palestine, Julius Caesar. The reason they took this over, Palestine, was not just because they wanted to conquer it particularly, but there was strong forces—the Parthians and the Persians— out to the east. And they wanted to stabilize their eastern flank, so to speak. And that’s exactly what they did. So now we have a situation in which we have the high priesthood very important. The Romans are in control. And as the Romans are in control, they gave power to the priesthood and to the developing governmental body, which is called the Sanhedrin. So the Sanhedrin was a group of 70 men. The high priest was the moderator, the chairman, of the Sanhedrin. They had the political power that was delegated to them by Rome. And as Jesus comes on the scene, we find that the priesthood is very important. The high priest is very important. It is a political office rather than primarily a religious office.

As things develop, this group becomes very, very fearful of the position of the Lord Jesus, because they could see that He was gaining all kinds of attention and all kinds of popularity among the people. And ultimately, this is what is going to bring Jesus down, at least from a human standpoint.

I’d like to mention one or two other things that are very important that follow on in this. As the Romans took control, the Romans put a king on the throne and that is King Herod, actually the son of Herod Antipas. Herod the Great was put on the throne in 42 BC to keep peace in the country. He was a very strong person. He was an Idumean—that is, coming from the tribe of Edom, from the south. He was partly Jewish. In 42 BC when they put him on the throne, he actually didn’t have control of Jerusalem because the Parthians came in and took control of it for a while. But finally, he gains control about 37 BC, and he is the one who is ruling at the time that Jesus was born. When Herod was put on the throne, his job was to keep peace in this whole Middle East. The purpose of his being there on the throne, as far as the Romans were concerned, was to keep peace, to keep everything held down. But this, of course, was still a melting pot. It was still a time of great troubles, of great tragedies, of great killings, as we see, even as Herod killed off the babies of the time of the Lord Jesus.

Finally, Herod died. And when Herod died in BC 4, the question is: Who is going to take control of the country at this point? The country was then divided into four great segments, and these also become important in the time of Christ. The four sections corresponded to what we call a tetrarchy, a rule of four. Actually, there weren’t really four ruling, but there were four major sections of the country. One was Samaria and Judea, over which originally Archelaus, the son of Herod, was put in charge. We will see about him in a moment. And then there was Perea, which is called the Eastern Bank today. It is over where the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan is, or part of it is. Perea goes from southern Galilee, just south of Galilee, down through to the middle of the Dead Sea. And then there is the tetrarchy of Galilee, which is just where you’d expect it to be, west of the Sea of Galilee. And then northwest of that was the tetrarchy of Philip. We don’t hear much about Philip, and the only time that Jesus goes to that area was when he went to Caesarea Philippi. It is called Caesarea Philippi, to contrast it from Caesarea by the sea.

But the important thing we need to notice here is that the son of Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, who was prominent in the life of John the Baptist and in the life of Jesus, ruled over Perea and Galilee. And, in ruling over Perea and Galilee, he controlled the country in which Jesus spent a great deal of his time. Interestingly enough, most of the first part of Jesus’ ministry was in Galilee, [while] the last part of it, or near the last part of it, was in Perea. And Judea was given, as I mentioned, to Archelaus. The problem with Archelaus was that he angered the Jews. Remember now that the purpose of the Romans was to keep peace on this eastern front. Archelaus was counterproductive in this. And finally, the Jews were ready to revolt. And in AD 6, he was removed. In his place was put not a son of Herod, but of another person who is called a procurator, and the later one that we are familiar with is Pontius Pilate.

So to recap a little bit, at the time of Christ, when He came on the scene, we have these various tetrarchies growing out of the need to divide the country up and govern it for the Romans after the death of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas, the son of Herod, was ruling over Galilee and Perea. And Philip was ruling over the tetrarchy of Philip in the northwest. But what we’re probably most concerned about is what happened in Samaria and Judea, and that is now ruled over by several people appointed by the Roman government especially for that purpose.

Now there is an area here that we have not touched on that I would like to move into, and that is the impact of the Hellenizing as it came down into Palestine. Over the years, especially from the time that the Seleucids took control and they put this tremendous pressure on the people, we have the question: Are the Jewish people going to become Greeklike—give up their beliefs and their ways of life—or are they going to resist it? There was a great confrontation on this, we might say, which developed into the groups that we call the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Zealots and the Herodians. We need to know something about these groups of people. Some are more prominently mentioned in the life of Christ. Some are just sort of in the shadows in the background, but we need to make this the vision in our thinking.

There are two issues basically: (1) One is cultural and religious; and the other, (2) two, is what we might call political. These two issues divided people on each side of the spectrum. On the one side of the spectrum, the issue of the cultural religious issue of relationship to Hellenism put the Pharisees on one side and the Sadducees on the other side. The Sadducees, broadly speaking, stood for accommodation. The Pharisees were separatists—separatists not in perhaps a denominational or ecclesiastical sense as we think of it today, but they were separatists in terms of resisting the cultural and the religious pressures of Hellenization. They began as the Hasidim, or those who were particularly religious and what we would call fundamentalists today. The first reference to the Pharisees is about 135 BC. They were not preachers. They were not theologians as such. They were middle-class laymen actually. As a matter of fact, if they lived today, you’d find them belonging to the Rotary Club or the Lions Club or whatever. You’d find them in real estate, maybe a chariot salesman. They were middle-class laymen, very religious, but they were not, as we would say, members of the cloth or clergymen. They were very active in the synagogues—just a word about the synagogues, to refresh our memory.

When the temple was destroyed in 586 BC, it was obviously devastating to the religious life of Israel because the temple was the one place of worship. They had never had any other place of worship since it had been built. And even since the days of the tabernacle, there was to be only one place of worship and sacrifice. Then they were all taken over to Babylon. They had seen their place of worship destroyed in Jerusalem. And they got over to Babylon; and they need something to hold them together, ethnically, religiously, culturally, and so on. And so the evidence is that these synagogues—which is from a Greek word meaning to gather together— sprang up probably during the period of the exile. Then, when they came back from the exile, even though they rebuilt the temple, they developed these synagogues so that there were hundreds and hundreds of synagogues. (And they couldn’t drive 20 miles on an Interstate to worship on a Saturday morning.) So these were all within walking distance of the people. We’re told by Josephus that at the time of Jesus, there were about 1,500 synagogues in Palestine. He claims there were about 500 of them in Judea and Jerusalem alone.

So synagogues were all over the place. They were getting relatively small. They were the size of perhaps a couple of large classrooms, maybe hold about anywhere from 50 to 150 people, and they were not large, massive buildings by any means. But they were all over the place. And of course this becomes important as Jesus goes around teaching in the synagogues. We don’t read about synagogues in Jerusalem, although they were there. We read about the temple in Jerusalem.

So my point is that there were synagogues scattered all over the land, and these Pharisees were very active in the synagogues. You find the Pharisees and the scribes (which are pretty much parallel in their beliefs) in Jerusalem. But the place where they were most active and had the most influence was in the synagogues. The Pharisees held to the oral tradition of the law, that is, the interpretation of the law as being authoritative. They believed in the inspiration, as we might say, of the Old Testament. But they put great weight on interpretation of it. So it was not just what the Bible said, but what people thought that it meant when it’s said. So as they got into this, of course, they added all kinds of interpretations which, in effect, meant adding all kinds of laws. And this is where Jesus came into conflict with them, because He was working from the Old Testament. They were working from the Old Testament plus. And they were really on two different frequencies, we might say, because when they claim that Jesus broke this rule or broke that rule, it was really their rules not Moses’ rules that were being broken. So they held to this oral tradition; and they applied the law very, very legalistically—extremely so.

For instance, they would say that you could not on the Sabbath walk through a field of grain because you might knock some grain off, and that would be reaping. And you might step on some, and that would be threshing it. And the wind might blow some, and that would be winnowing it and so on. It was very, very legalistic. And they also had rules about if you had a toothache, you could put something on the outside of your gum, but you couldn’t swallow something. I don’t think they had aspirin in those days. But if they did, you couldn’t have swallowed one. But you could have put it on the outside.

There are about 6,000 of them in the New Testament period, these Pharisees. Generally speaking, the Pharisees were threatened by Christ mostly in the area of their religious beliefs and in what they considered His opposition to, or shall we say, lack of authenticating their interpretation of the law. So their objection to Christ was in the theological area, not in the political area particularly. Some Pharisees came to believe in Christ. As a matter of fact, a good number of them eventually came. So we can’t say all of the Pharisees wiped Him out. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, of course, were members of the Sanhedrin, who actually were Pharisees in belief.

Now we’ve been talking about how this cultural/religious issue of the Hellenizing divided the people. And on the one side we see the Pharisees. Now let’s look at the other side, the other extreme, the Sadducees. One word that would summarize them would be accommodation. The Pharisees—separation. The Sadducees—accommodation.

They emerged from the Hasmoneans. Hasmonean is the name of the family of priests that came out from these Maccabees. As time went on and the priesthood expanded in its influence, they of course became the aristocracy of Israel. They became the de facto authority figures in Israel, the priests. The Sadducees were priests (not all of the priests were Sadducees), but they controlled the priesthood. Most of them were in Jerusalem. You don’t find many references to the Sadducees in Galilee, for instance. But every time Jesus went to Jerusalem, he ran into some of these Sadducees. They were around the temple. They had great power in the temple. They controlled the Sanhedrin actually. They ceremonialized the law. Instead of looking for theological interpretations and taking those interpretations as being authentic and binding, they rather looked at the ceremony: What should we be doing in our ceremonies, not so much how should we behave ourselves? They held that only the Pentateuch was authoritative. And they rejected miracles and angels and immortality.

The interesting thing is that the Sadducees don’t really come into strong conflict with Jesus until later on in His ministry. And the reason for that is that the first two-thirds of Jesus’ ministry took place in Galilee. You’re going to see in broad outline that most of His contact with religious leaders was with the Pharisees in Galilee and then down to Jerusalem. He made several trips to Jerusalem. But it wasn’t until He moved down to Jerusalem for the last time before the crucifixion that the Sadducees really become a problem in the life of Christ. Of course, they rejected the resurrection of the body; and this came to a head, as we will see, in the resurrection of Lazarus. This really started things going with them.

They absorbed much Greek philosophical thought. They were not separatists. They absorbed a lot of the Hellenization. And there were fewer of them than there were of the Pharisees. So the Pharisees and Sadducees were very different in their origin and in their power and so on. The Pharisees were religiously oriented. The Sadducees were politically oriented. And we might say, broadly speaking, that the religious opposition to Christ came from the Pharisees, and the political opposition came from the Sadducees—as sort of a simplification.

The second issue was the political issue. And that is the relationship to Rome. What I’ve been talking about so far has been the reaction to the cultural background. That is, the Hellenization and so on: How is it affecting these religious groups; how precipitated are these religious groups. The second one is the political issue. That is, to what extent should the Jews cooperate with Rome, pay taxes to Rome? What did they think of the Roman soldiers being around? This is more of a political issue now than a religious one.

There were two sides to this. Again, on the far right, we might say the conservative side, would be the Zealots. One word that would characterize them is revolution. They would say, “Let’s revolt against Rome!” They were inspired by the Maccabees. They would look back to the Maccabees, and they would say, “Look what happened back there. Let’s take back our country from Rome.” They rejected Roman authority. They opposed payment of taxes. As a matter of fact, there was Judas of Galilee in AD 6 who was a Zealot—that we read about. They were associated with Galilee. This becomes important because Jesus came from Galilee and the Zealots were strong in Galilee. The farther away you got from Jerusalem, the more following they would have. So their strength was in Galilee; so that when Jesus came down, called a king, and comes out of Galilee, and comes down to Jerusalem, He is automatically suspect because of where He comes from. And they were involved in a revolt that actually did come about in AD 66 that caused the destruction of Jerusalem.

On the other side were the Herodians. The Herodians were named that because they accepted the rule of the Romans. And, of course, the Romans had appointed Herod. And so they are called Herodians because they accommodated themselves. The word we might use here is cooperation. They cooperated with the Roman government. They were centered in Judea. They were conformists. They supported Roman rule. You’ll find most of the Herodians down there. For instance, you don’t read about Herodians coming up to talk to Jesus in the synagogue in Capernaum. They tended to be Sadducees. They tended to be close to the Sadducean camp, I should say, because they were cooperating with the Gentile authority and they opposed the Pharisees. The Herodians and the Sadducees were on one side; the Pharisees and the Zealots were on the other side. But the division was, in the first case, Pharisees and Zealots tended to be more religious; and, with the second group, the Sadducees and the Herodians tended to be more political.

In thinking of the world into which Jesus came then, just to summarize this, we find that He came into a world that was controlled by the Romans politically, but which had a great undergirding from the invasion of Alexander the Great, a great undergirding from the philosophy and religion of the Greeks. The Romans had established world peace. And national barriers had been removed. Travel and communication was better at this time than at any time until just a few years ago, a century ago. And the Greeks, of course, spread their language throughout this whole area, and their philosophy. People who knew anything about Greek philosophy and Greek religion were becoming very uncomfortable with it. They were looking for something else, and this accounts for much of the spread of the gospel in the early days of the church.

The Jews themselves provided a religious background into which Jesus came in which there was an anticipation of a Messiah. There’s been great debate as to what kind of a Messiah the Jews anticipated. But the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Old Testament, was spread throughout the Roman Empire, and people knew about the coming of a Messiah. From it, the dispersed Jews had gone into the synagogues throughout the empire; so that when word came throughout the empire that there had been a person who was a King, who had come as the Messiah in Palestine, it was not falling on ears that had never heard. These people were conditioned for this kind of thing and, of course, their receptions would vary considerably.

The Jews had preserved monotheism; and as I mentioned a few minutes ago, they were so struck with this monotheism that they had a hard time accepting that God could come in the flesh. They saw Him not as God. And, of course, they had problems with the Trinity in this. They did not have a concept of the Trinity. And therefore, as they saw Him come in the flesh and claim to be God, they saw this as another god. And they were not willing to worship another god.

When Jesus came, there was an expectation, a restlessness among the people. They probably were going off on the various people who called themselves Messiah. And in our next session, we’re going to see how, when John the Baptist came onto the scene, He came onto a scene that was uniquely prepared for His coming. As we read in Galatians 4:4: “In the fullness of time, God sent His Son, born of a woman.” I guess everything we’ve been looking at in this particular session could be summarized, “in the fullness of time.” This is what created the fullness of time: Great change from the days of the Persian Empire, through the Greek Empire, into the Roman Empire and in Palestine itself; the formation of these various political and religious groups with Rome just trying to keep peace in the Middle East. This is going to become important because as Jesus was proclaimed King, or as He was thought to be King, this would be a threat to Rome. The Romans didn’t pay much attention to it at first. But as we see in the trial of Christ, it becomes very important.

So this is the world preparation for Christ, and in our next session we will go on to see how God burst in on the scene.