03 - Jewish Backdrop

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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The Didache, P45, Washingtonianus, and More!

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Well, it's good to be back here in Phoenix.

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Let's see, two weeks ago, well, it wouldn't be this time because there's a nine -hour difference.

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But two weeks ago, Sunday, I was speaking at the

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Goodwood Baptist Church in Cape Town, South Africa. And then last

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Sunday at the Kensington Temple in London.

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And then the next day, I went up to Cold Rain, Ireland, and spoke up there.

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So our frequent flyer count is quite healthy at the moment. But I think this is the first time

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I've ever taken this trip where I did not even get a sniffle.

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Normally, I get a little something. Normally, it doesn't put me down or anything like that, but I get some type of something.

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But I didn't even get sniffles on this trip. And when you consider

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Phoenix, Heathrow, Heathrow, Johannesburg, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Johannesburg, Heathrow, Heathrow, Belfast, Belfast, Heathrow, Heathrow, Phoenix, that's a lot of time with hundreds of my closest friends in a nice, closed, pressurized metal or carbon fiber tube, depending on whether I was in a 747 or a 380, one of the two.

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So I'm also doing a little backup here. I'm recording on my phone as well as the microphone.

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So if we get any dropouts, let me know. I'll have the phone backup plan going on there.

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So we'll double check and see how that's going to work out. So very appreciative.

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The church assisted in getting me over there, so I'm very appreciative of that.

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It's a sad comment that the location where we did the debate at the

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University of Johannesburg, myself and a gentleman who has been witnessing to Muslims in South Africa for a tremendously long period of time,

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Brother John Gilchrist. They call him Uncle John. And that is because he is a,

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I don't know, just a tremendously godly man, a very nice man, just a salt -of -the -earth type fellow.

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He was going door -to -door in Muslim communities in the 1970s. And he and I teamed up for the first time.

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He's been to a number of my debates, but he and I teamed up for the first time to debate

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Bashir Varnia and Mohammad Kavadia at the University of Johannesburg.

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And within eight days,

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I think, eight or nine days later, students, it's a huge building,

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I mean massive building, and students burned it to the ground, gutted it.

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That room that we had that debate in, smoldering ruins. Students are not always the brightest people on the planet.

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They're basically demanding free education. And it's sort of counterproductive to burn down the place where you want to have your free education.

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It doesn't make a lot of sense, but there are a lot of problems in many places in the world today.

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And this idea of entitlement and a free lunch is, unfortunately, taking over all over the place.

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Anyway, so good to be back. And I think the next major overseas trip is looking like it's going to be

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Australia rather than Hong Kong. It depends on a few things, but it looks like it may be back down to Oz later in the year.

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We have been looking at church history, and we haven't gotten very far because I've been trying to lay a decent foundation.

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We are not the only, our group here this morning is not the only people following this particular study.

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I'm discovering that there are a lot of people that are interested in this subject of church history.

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I was talking with some folks after the debate at Kensington Temple a week ago Friday that I had with Adnan Rashid.

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We had an incredibly well -attended event there in London. They had an overflow room totally packed out, people sitting on the stairs.

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It was really amazing. But I was talking to some folks afterwards, and one person had gone to a

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Bible college and said, I remember what you said many times, that the two classes that you took in Bible college and seminary that have been the most helpful to you as an apologist were

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Greek and church history. So I'm taking Greek and church history right now. And so I thought that was pretty cool that somebody was doing that, but it's true.

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And having a solid understanding of why we study church history and some of the background issues is very important.

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Now, obviously, we have to make some decision as to where we're going to start. I can't cover everything. And we've laid the foundation, but now the question becomes, well, where do you start?

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Because obviously, you could literally start in the New Testament, because the Book of Acts is church history.

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It is specifically and intentionally supposed to be, though it is not meant to be, an exhaustive or balanced church history.

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It starts with the apostles. It starts with Peter. It starts with all of that.

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But then it very purposefully shifts its focus to dealing with Paul.

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And some people have wondered as to why that is. We live in a day, by the way, of tremendously strong anti -Paulanism in the academy.

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Even amongst those who would call themselves Christians, there is a shockingly strong movement to marginalize, to criticize.

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And I'm not even talking about the many scholars that would reject certain of the Pauline letters as being

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Pauline. I've mentioned to you before, for example, that Bart Ehrman can say the things that Bart Ehrman says, because Bart Ehrman has a minimized canon of Paul's writings.

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Paul only wrote seven of the letters attributed to him. And so the pastoral epistles, 1st 2nd

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Timothy, Titus, they're not Paul. Colossians, Ephesians, not Paul. And so you cut it all down.

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And then, of course, you can then set those books in contradiction to each other. Not even talking about that, just simply talking about people that really believe that Paul was an inappropriate and wrong interpreter of Jesus, that that should have been

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Peter, that should have been John, that should have been the disciples in that area.

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And, of course, people look at the Book of Acts and go, so we'll see. You know, Luke's not even fair here, because he doesn't continue the story of the apostles, but instead branches off and goes this direction with Paul.

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Well, if the theory is true, and I tend to think that it is, if the theory is true that Luke and Acts were specifically written to document the fact that the

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Christian faith was not a subversive movement in the sense that it was seeking to set up a rival political system to the

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Roman system, which, of course, was what people were saying. You either have to say Kaiser Quodias, Caesar is

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Lord, or Jesus is Lord. You can't say both. Well, that's true, but there's a reason, and it has to do with the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of earth, and so on and so forth.

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If Luke wrote Luke and Acts as an amicus brief, as something that was going to be submitted to document what the background of Paul's teaching and stuff were, then it would make perfect sense.

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You have to start with Jesus. You have to give the story of Jesus. And then you have to give the story of the early disciples.

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But then once Paul comes along, it's his trial in Rome, so you're going to talk about him.

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You're not going to fill up pages and pages of papyrus with writing about somebody else.

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It would be irrelevant to the situation with Paul. So it actually makes sense. I think it's one of the strongest arguments for that view of Luke -Acts, that it goes that direction.

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But even then, Luke had to choose what stories he told, what information he included.

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There's all sorts of stuff that clearly wasn't included, because it covers years and years of time in the amount of space that could be read in just a fairly brief amount of time.

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So every historian has to choose how you're going to tell your story, what your standards are going to be, in light of what you're attempting to communicate.

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When a historian writes a introductory book of church history, Banner of Truth has one that has all sorts of pretty pictures and stuff like that in it.

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Well, guess what? It doesn't go very in -depth. Because if it's going to be introductory, it can't go very in -depth.

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You're going to select material based upon your audience and what you want to communicate to them.

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When I first took church history in seminary, we had to read Kenneth Scott Lauderette's two -volume set on church history.

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And I've frequently described it as exciting as chewing aluminum foil. I was mentioning that while I was in England, and I had to change to the proper pronunciation.

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Aluminum. You might go, really? Yes. Across the pond, it's aluminum.

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So chewing aluminum foil. But anyway, it's pretty dry stuff.

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But each volume's yay thick. And they're paperbacks. I never saw any.

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You could always tell who was actually doing their reading assignments in the church history class. That book could not possibly be read fully without falling apart.

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The spine was just too big. So you could tell the students who were having to stick parts of their book back in, they were actually doing the reading.

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The guys whose books were in good shape, they weren't doing that reading. No way. Just to get to the inner part, you had to break that binding, and it would just start falling apart.

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But anyway, in the pastor's office, there are two sets of Schaff's eight -volume history of the

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Christian church. You get a little more detail there, you know? But even then,

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Schaff has to sit there and go, how do I organize this? And generally, it ends up being by, in a chronological sense, but you can't just do chronology and make that make any sense.

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If you want to talk about Augustine, Augustine lives for a long time. Lots of other stuff happens while he's alive.

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So again, the point is, you always have to keep that in mind when looking at any historical source is, how did the author choose to relate these things?

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So when we look at church history, obviously, one of the issues we do need to deal with to have some type of understanding is the soil out of which the church is growing, the world into which the church is going.

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And obviously, the first and primary context of the New Testament is

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Judaism. It is appropriately said.

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Now, there's a bunch of movements out there, by the way, right now. Weird, weird stuff on the internet.

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And I'm not just talking about the Black Israelite movement, the

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Black Hebrew movement, something like that. Wow. I'm not talking about on -another -planet -weird type stuff, but that is other -planet -weird stuff.

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But there's the Hebrew Roots Movement, and there's all these folks on, quote unquote,

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Christian television hawking books about how the secret to understanding the New Testament is to recognize it was not originally written in Greek.

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And it was originally written in Hebrew, you see. And so once you go back to the Hebrew, now, there's a little problem with that.

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First of all, the vast majority of scholars do not believe that. There is one early church father by the name of Papias.

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And we don't have any of Papias' original writings, but we have Papias being quoted by everybody else. That's not the best way of having sources, but that's how we know something about him.

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And evidently, Papias is quoted to have said that Matthew, get to it eventually,

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Matthew originally wrote his gospel in Hebrew. Well, one thing's for certain.

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The gospel of Matthew we have today was originally written in Greek. It's not a translation of a

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Hebrew. You can tell when someone's translating from one language into another. When we look at the

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Greek Septuagint, you can tell it's a Greek translation of a Hebrew original.

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Matthew was a Greek original. Every book of the New Testament was written in Greek originally. There really isn't any question about that amongst serious scholars of the subject.

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And so there is no Hebrew New Testament to go back to. So when people sell you the

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Hebrew New Testament, they're making it up. They had to choose what

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Hebrew words to use based upon the original Greek. And so when people mislead others by saying, well, originally that one in the

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Aramaic would have been, in the Hebrew would have been, blah, blah, blah, blah, they don't know what those originally.

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Even in Rome, some of you have seen some of my debates with Roman Catholics down through the ages. It's getting to be that long, down through the ages.

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Starting in 1990. You know that in regards to papacy, there's constant argument, constant assertion that, well, you know,

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Jesus said to Peter, on this rock, you are Peter, rock, and upon this rock

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I will build my church. And the original Aramaic would have been kepha. Well, the fact of the matter is, you don't know.

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A, that he was speaking Aramaic, and B, what the original Aramaic would have been. You don't know. It's a guess.

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And other scholars guess differently. Some scholars say it would have been limna, not kepha. So you can't build anything upon a foundation, superstructure upon a foundation that's that weak and that lacking.

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And so there is a lot of stuff out there. Just be aware of the looniness that is out there.

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But the fact is that the apostles did not see themselves, quote unquote, founding a new religion.

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The constant refrain is, Jesus is the Messiah promised by the prophets of the

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Old Testament all the way back to Genesis. Same God, the fulfillments, everything.

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And that means there is a very strong Jewish character to the

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New Testament. It needs to be understood in that way. And it is a tragedy of church history that we will see a number of times that because of the temperature of the conflict between the synagogue and the early church, which we see in the

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Book of Acts, which we see in Paul's epistles, which we see even in Matthew, at least in the conflict with the

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Jewish leaders, because of that, eventually there is a divide that comes to exist.

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Now, there had to be a divide as far as we see over and over again in Acts. Paul goes to synagogue.

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Some believe. The rest become hardened. There's a split. OK, that's necessary.

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We have to have the church being the church. You have to have the gospel. And you can't have some syncretistic compromise between Judaism and Christianity or something.

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But the result of this was an ignoring of Paul's warnings in Romans 11.

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Don't become arrogant. The Gentiles, don't become arrogant against the branches that have been broken off so you could be grafted in.

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It is God that has grafted you in. It was all of grace in the first place. Don't become arrogant against them.

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Well, a lot of people did. And there is a lot of improper, unnecessary, un -Christian, anti -Jewish sentiment in the early church.

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And not only did this have major ramifications and results in the medieval period, when you have inquisitions against Jews and all sorts of atrocities and burning of synagogues and all sorts of things like that, which there was never, ever any meaningful biblical basis for any of that kind of stuff.

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But it ended up having an unforeseen impact that would last, well, it's lasted today, honestly, but would not be meaningfully counteracted until the

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Reformation itself. What do I mean? This is, there are a couple of facts that I want to make sure everybody gets down in the church history series.

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There are the things I told all my church history classes, this will be on the final. When I tap on the thing with my finger, this will be on the final.

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That means three years from now, Gary, I can, in the middle of one of our toughest climbs, if I look over to you and say, when was the

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Council of Isaiah? I don't care if it's the last thing you say as you depart this planet, you will get up enough energy to say 325

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AD. So just write it down, memorize it, that's just one of the things you need to know, is the

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Council of Isaiah is in 325 AD. One of the other things you need to know are the two major early church writers who knew both

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Greek and Hebrew. Now, immediately, the first thing shouldn't be,

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I better write these down. The first thing should be, there were only two? Yeah, there were only two.

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Now, that's the amazing thing. The two were Origen, who himself was a wild -eyed heretic, and Jerome, who wrote the letters, who could dabble a little bit here and dabble a little bit there, but actually having a command of language.

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The only two major ones, Origen and Jerome. What that demonstrates is that this division had resulted in such a degradation of the

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Christian view of the Old Testament that the Old Testament became a closed book to the vast majority of Christian believers all the way through to the

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Reformation. Now, that has major implications. As you can see, we look more carefully at this with Origen.

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His idea was that the surface grammatical meaning of any text of scripture, if anybody can figure it out, then it's not that special.

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It's the allegorical meaning. It's the deeper meaning that you should be going for, not the surface level meaning.

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And that ended up creating such a division that the

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Old Testament background to the New Testament books became lost, and many of the beliefs that we will examine, that we just go, how did anybody come up with that?

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Well, if you only had the New Testament and the Old Testament's just a storybook with allegorical meanings that you can just turn into whatever you want, you can understand it.

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Think about Hebrews, those of you who are here for the Hebrew series. What if we didn't have the Old Testament background?

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What if all that stuff behind the issue was something that you no longer had access to?

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What could you do with major sections of Hebrew? It would be next to impossible to figure it all out.

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And so church history can end up having a serious impact, even upon later theology and practice, and so it's something to keep in mind.

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Now, one of the things to understand, the Jewish faith really stood out in that day.

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If you remember your history, and really, to be honest with you, if I ever wanted to do a full -on church history class,

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I wouldn't start with the New Testament. I'd start at the end of Malachi, because if there's any black hole for the vast majority of us, what is it?

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It's the 400 years between Malachi and the New Testament, and that's not a good thing, because what's the background of the New Testament?

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Those 400 years. And so, for example, where did Pharisees come from? How about Sadducees?

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The apocryphal books, the Book of Maccabees, all these stories that are referred to, not as scripture, they are referred to.

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Everybody is assumed to know those stories, and that's why we don't even notice them, because we don't know those stories generally, is because of the fact there was literature written during that time period, and things happened.

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You know, it's not like everything ended at the end of Malachi, and then two days later,

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Matthew comes along. It looks that way in your Bible, but there's a 400 -year gap, and a lot of important stuff happened.

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And the Pharisees arose, and the Sadducees arose, and there were wars, and Alexander the

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Great came sweeping through and brought the Greek language, and then the Romans come along, and all sorts of stuff going on during that time period.

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And of course, you have the time period of Jesus's life and the ministry of the

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Apostle Paul up until, well, what is the key date in Jewish history?

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AD 70. AD 70. If you don't know it, write it down. AD 70. What happens?

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The city of Jerusalem is destroyed by Titus and the Roman legions, and the nation of Israel is destroyed.

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And the Jewish people are dispersed with tremendous violence and death.

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And the records that have been kept for hundreds of years of the priesthood lines, everything else, gone.

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Gone. One of the things that's been interesting to point out is if certain of the prophecies fulfilled in Jesus demand that we know who's who, after AD 70, none of those prophecies could ever be fulfilled.

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The Messiah had to have come before then to fulfill some of those prophecies. And he did. But anyway, key, key date.

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Well, up until AD 70, that period is called either Taniatic, T -A -N -N -A -I -T -I -C,

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Taniatic Judaism, or Second Temple Judaism. Second Temple being the rebuilt temple after the destruction of Jerusalem.

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Who destroyed Jerusalem first, and in what year? Nebuchadnezzar.

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Close. Thank you. Who said that? Was that you?

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OK. OK, well, I can see why that one's down here.

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Because it's dead. 586, 87.

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Now, why would I write it like that? Because it took place over the New Year's weekend? Exactly.

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One of the really tough things about doing chronology in the ancient world is, even today, for example,

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Ramadan just started. I think it just started. And Ramadan is the ninth month of the

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Islamic calendar. But it keeps moving 10 to 11 days earlier in our year every year, because they use a lunar calendar rather than a solar calendar.

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And so the year of Hijra, since Muhammad and his followers moved from Mecca to Medina, that's where their calendar starts, 622

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AD, our time, the number of years is different for them than it is for us, because their years are shorter.

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So it's been more years. So actually, I'm awful glad we've got calculators. And I can just pull it up on my phone, and you figure out what year it is.

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But the same thing happened in the ancient world, where even if they used a solar calendar, sometimes the year would start in the spring, sometime in the fall, sometime in the middle of the year, from our perspective.

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And so complicated things I've ever read was a book on the chronology of the

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Israelite kings. Because it'll say, in the first year of King so -and -so, while so -and -so was reigning in so -and -so.

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Well, those are really helpful, except you've got to know how those people calculated the years of the reign of their kings.

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For example, sometimes you had an ascension year. So the first year wasn't counted in the full year. Or any period of time up to the beginning of that year was considered the ascension period, and then the first year would be after that.

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Man, that really complicates things. So 586, 587, Nebuchadnezzar takes

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Jerusalem. This is important, by the way, because the 70 years that Jeremiah prophesied began before this, and before this.

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There was a previous, but if you read Jeremiah carefully, he's telling the people, stop resisting, you'll be able to stay.

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The captivity has begun, but if you stop resisting, you'll be able to stay under the rule. But when they rebelled, then finally, boom, they're out.

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But this is an established date. We have literally hundreds of cuneiform tablets that document that event in history.

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We know when it happened. The Babylonians record it happening. They've got pictures of Jews and stuff from the temple being dragged to Babylon.

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There's no question it happened in history. Why is this important? Very, very briefly, you might go, does that have nothing to do with church history?

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Well, sort of, maybe not, but there is a group, they no longer talk to you about this.

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About 20 years ago, they talked to you about this all the time. And they're the folks that ring your doorbell on a

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Saturday morning and want to talk to you about Armageddon. Jehovah's Witnesses. Jehovah's Witnesses, up until recently, taught that Christ returned invisibly in 1914.

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And they did so through a complicated interpretation of Daniel's prophecies and Jeremiah and everything else.

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But the only way they could make this work was to deny that date and move it back to 604, 605.

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And so for 30, 40 years, their publications said that Nebuchadnezzar took

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Jerusalem to 604, 605. Now, they were the only people in the world that said that. Any Jehovah's Witness that went to a public library and looked things up would have a completely different date.

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But so great was their control over their people that they could pull it off.

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And now they don't even talk about it anymore, because they're getting rid of the 1914 date anyways.

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And I don't think they're going to replace it with anything else. I think they've learned their lesson. But for a long time, the society literally, and one of the guys who wrote the article attacking this, eventually left the society.

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And he told the story about it. He said, we knew when the date was. But the only way to make the prophecy work was to fudge the dates.

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And so they did. And that was what was in the published materials. It was 604, 605. It was 586, 587.

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OK, so there is the destruction of the first temple. So the period afterwards, with the rebuilding of the temple, becomes second temple

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Judaism, Tanniatic Judaism. And that, then, is the context of the

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New Testament itself, and is a very important context for the first 40 -ish years of the

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Christian church, especially as it exists in Israel. But it's likewise just as important in other places.

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For example, we know that around 51, AD 51, the emperor kicked all the

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Jews out of Rome temporarily. And most theories are that he did so because of all the fights that were going on amongst

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Jews. Well, what might that have been? That was probably the Jewish -Christian debates that were going on.

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And remember, when Paul is even brought before various magistrates, eventually the magistrate just goes, oh, stop, stop, stop.

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You all are just arguing about stuff from your law. Not interested, get out of here. And he doesn't differentiate between Christianity and Judaism.

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And so if the emperor doesn't do the same thing, then probably that initial historical expulsion of the

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Jews, which also resulted in the expulsion of Christians, was due to the same situation, the same context that was going on there.

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And so those Jews would be influenced by and determined by in their beliefs by Second Temple Judaism as well.

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And so that's where there's been a huge controversy over the past, well, it started in 1975.

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But at first, no one really noticed it for about 10 years. And then it started broiling a good bit more.

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But a guy named E .P. Sanders and some other people wrote books, eventually led to what's called the

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New Perspective on Paul. Sanders' thesis was that the Reformers had gotten the

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Jews all wrong. The Jews weren't just a bunch of works, salvation, self -righteousness type guys.

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They were much more covenantally grace -oriented, blah, blah, blah.

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So we've got to completely reread Paul and all the rest of this stuff. Now, that's a whole other area.

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But the point is that there's a tremendous amount of study that goes into what was

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Judaism like in the days of Jesus. And what would be another major, major source of information that is fairly relevant,

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I'm sorry, fairly recent, that would shed more light upon the

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Judaism of Jesus' day? Dead Sea Scrolls. So Dead Sea Scrolls get discovered.

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We discover the Qumran community. Clearly, these were outliers.

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These were individuals outside the mainstream of Jewish experience. Even their own books would indicate that that was the case.

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But clearly, they had a lot of interaction with the scribes and Pharisees, Sadducees.

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The Sadducees, by the way, had most of the political power. The Pharisees had most of the religious power. And it's clear from reading

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Dead Sea Scrolls that the Qumran community was viewed as outsiders.

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And hence, there was also stuff in there about the false prophets leading the people astray, and so on and so forth.

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And it was all aimed at the Pharisees and the Sadducees in Jerusalem. And so there was strong conflict between them and a lot of debate between them,

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I'm sure, as well. And the Qumran community clearly represented a minority of the

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Jewish people. But it's still fascinating to look at their preservation of the text of scripture, what their view of scripture was, what other books they were writing, how they understood law, and things like that.

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But then, what's one of the biggest issues that Jesus addresses with the

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Jews in his denunciations of them and in his dialogues with them?

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The issue of tradition and the interpretation of the scriptures themselves.

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And how had the system developed to where you had the 630 -some -odd laws that had been formulated?

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I mean, today, and it's been this way for a long, long time,

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I mentioned this to you. I think I mentioned, well, if I mentioned this before, forgive me.

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When you've been traveling as much as I have, sometimes you forget where you were when you said something over the past couple of weeks.

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But I think I mentioned to you the fact that we have visitors, so it doesn't matter.

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And I'm flattering myself to think that all of you would remember what I said a few weeks ago anyway. So except for George, who writes everything down.

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Everybody else is taking good notes, too. But even today, when you look at a printed edition of the

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Bible, the word will be on the third line at the end of the line.

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Become masters of Talmud, it is said that you should be able to take a nail and drive it into the

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Talmud. And when you open the Talmud, wherever that point had gone to, identify the page and the place.

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And the person has to be able to tell you what word that the point of that nail was pointing to. That's how well you have to know the text.

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Now, that's an amazing thing. But it goes back to, for example, the

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Mazarites. The Mazarites were Jewish scribes about 900 years after Christ who developed extremely elaborate means of making sure that their copying of the text of scripture would be as close to a photocopier as you can get.

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In other words, they counted all the words on a page. And if you made a copy of that page, then there were checksums, sort of like how our computer programs work.

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And if you got to the end of the page and there weren't enough words, you messed up somewhere along the line and had to do it all over again.

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And it certainly froze the text at that point in history, which is a good thing.

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Also slowed down copying a good bit as well, I would imagine. But you're only copying for a small community. That's why it wasn't all that important.

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But that Mazaritic text is still pretty much the text the Old Testament used to this day.

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Now, I expected to get much farther than this. But I think it is important to have those backgrounds.

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I just mentioned the Talmud. What is the Talmud made of? Well, I wish we had a collection of the traditions of the

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Pharisees in the year 30 AD. That would be wonderful. Because then we'd have an exactly contemporaneous, here's what they believe in the days of Jesus, this is exactly what he's responding to, type of document.

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We don't have that. The closest thing we have to that is called the

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Mishnah. And the Mishnah, and there's a couple versions of it, but the

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Mishnah is collected between 200 and 250 years after the birth of Christ.

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So it's after the destruction of Jerusalem. Israel is in dispersion at this point in time.

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And so the Mishnah is as close as we get. It's about 200 to 250 years after Christ. So we can clearly identify things that have direct parallels in the

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New Testament. The Korban rule. Remember when Jesus said you invalidate the word of God when you invoked the

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Korban rule, which is where you gave all your belongings to the temple so you didn't have to use them to support your parents. Korban's rule is in the

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Mishnah. It's there. So we know there's a direct parallel there. But we have to be careful. Just because it's in the

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Mishnah doesn't necessarily mean that it exists in the days of Jesus. It's probable, but there was some development over that 200 years in between time.

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So it's an extremely important source. Then over the years, there was a commentary on the

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Mishnah that was written called the Gemara, the words, the commentary.

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And so if you look, I was looking at a modern printing of the Talmud recently.

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And what you've got is on a page, you'll have this part will be the

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Mishnah. And then this part is the Gemara. And so when you put these two together, the result is what's called the

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Talmud. And you've got the Babylonian Talmud. There are a couple of different versions.

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I have the Sensino Talmud, which I got when I was back in seminary. It's 22 or 26 volumes.

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I forget how long it is. I have a couple of editions of the Mishnah. All of it's available electronically now.

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But this then becomes the central document of Judaism, primarily in the medieval, sort of gives some cohesion to the people of Israel as they're scattered about and as they go into different communities.

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And obviously, they try to maintain their community. If you've ever seen Fiddler on the

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Roof, it's a fun historical musical.

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But it's based upon a lot of reality of Judaism in Russia and the centrality of the rabbi and the traditions that define the community and the pressures that were coming against that community remaining a distinct community and the great fear of that community being dispersed over time into the broader society and losing its distinctiveness and so on and so forth.

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And those scrolls, the scrolls would be the scripture. And then the books, the large books would be the

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Talmud. And now, of course, this is all being done post -Christian.

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And so there is material in the Talmud against Jesus. It's not overly kind material, as you would expect.

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Because as I noted earlier, just as there was a wholly inappropriate attitude of anti -Jewishness that developed amongst early church fathers, some early church fathers anyways, there was likewise an anti -Christian attitude that developed amongst many

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Jews that only became worse over time, especially once quote, unquote,

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Christianity, which I would call nominal, name -only Christianity, cultural Christianity. And the remnants of the

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Roman Empire began to persecute the Jewish people. Then it just, symbols like the cross and things like that just became symbols of hatred, symbols of persecution to the

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Jewish people. And so since the Gemara is being written after that time period and during that time period where persecution begins to take place, then the

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Talmud reflects this with repeating some less than appropriate stories as to how

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Jesus was conceived and so on and so forth. And so there's much more that could be said about that.

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But it is important to recognize that the Judaism of Jesus' day was not uniform.

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You can see that in the disagreements between the scribes and Pharisees. You see that in the division between Shammai and Hillel, the two

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Jewish schools on divorce. The followers of Shammai believing that you had to commit, the wife had to commit a serious sin, a covenant -breaking sin, for the marriage to be dissolved.

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Whereas the followers of Hillel, she burns the toast. You can divorce her if you want to. And that was the exact argument.

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Stop telling your wife that you're not going to divorce her for burning the toast. I've got good eyesight.

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And so that's the exact argument that they are trying to drag

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Jesus in the middle of Matthew chapter 19. So Hillel, Shammai, Gamaliel, they all appear in these writings.

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And so the New Testament recognizes these things. These things are historically validated.

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And it is important to recognize that Jewish background if we're going to have a good starting place from there.

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So I was actually going to get into the various Greek religions,

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Gnosticism, mystery religions, Stoicism. I didn't get there. Something tells me this church history series is going to be a little bit longer than the last one.

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But hopefully, a little bit more practical and useful, too. Because I think there's some important stuff there.

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All right? Real quick. Which person? Sorry. Hillel.

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Hillel. Mm -hmm. What? Sorry? You're saying the wrong person. No. No.

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No, we're not. We're not. OK. Let's close Word of Prayer. Father, we thank you for this day.

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We thank you that we can look back and look at your record of faithfulness to your people. We ask that you would help us to see ourselves with greater accuracy, be better servants of yours as we study these things.