Rome, Israel, and the Jesus Movement

The New Testament and the First Two Chapters as a Quick Overview

The New Testament and the first two chapters really sit us in the New Testament and so we're gonna do this as a very quick overview and summary so that we can start in two weeks right at really the beginning of the church after the time of the New Testament.

So as we start now again every time we gather for the Sunday nights I'm gonna have new sheets for the kids, we'll sing a hymn to our triune God, we'll recite the Nicene Creed at the end and sing the Gloria Patri and then I'm gonna give an overview of the reading just pulling out just a few little things along the way and the really important thing with that is I'm gonna skip over all sorts of things.

I want this to be as accessible as possible. I'm assuming a lot of people will not have read and if you have read then you already have a lot of the detail and information along the way and if you're still dissatisfied don't grumble or gripe because there is an advanced group that will kick off not this coming Saturday but the next Saturday and then every in-between Tuesday all the way through October, all right?

And so that'll be the time when you can ask all of the arcane technical questions and we'll dig a little bit deeper and I'll have some extra readings for us to really get our minds around the first three centuries of the church.

I also am gonna have a word of the evening for all the kids, all right? Now the word of the evening tonight is Roman. Roman. So if I say the word Roman you guys need to do something for me. You have to embody the Roman spirit.

The Romans were a very proud people and they were very mighty in their day. We're gonna be talking about that in a moment. So every time you hear that word Roman you need to flex your muscles just like the Romans thought they were doing in the world, all right?

All right, parents might have to help and don't leave me hanging but when we say the word Roman, I might even pause till we get the hang of it, you're gonna want to flex your muscles. So there'll be a word of the evening every time we get to it.

It's very important that you hear the word Roman and not Rome, all right? The word of the evening is Roman, okay? So don't flex that Rome or we'll have to call you out on that, okay? So this is a start and we are condensing the first two chapters because we want to get to the the 100s and beyond, okay?

And these first two chapters are getting us right to the edge of the 100s with Domitian and the Domitian persecutions in 96. I'm skipping over entirely the intro, the preface where Needham explains why he wrote this and how he wrote this.

He gives a nice little overview of how we understand and date things and why it is that the birth of Christ is dated to 4 BC now by most scholars, and again, I'm skipping over that entirely, but one thing I do want to draw from the introduction, and this is the bottom of page 15, and this is something that I really hope we'll all come to understand by the time we finish these first eight chapters in October.

And Nick Needham says at the bottom of page 15, whether we realize it or not, the great men of the early church are indeed our spiritual fathers. They shaped much of the worship in theology, especially the doctrine of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which we accept and confess today.

Early church fathers then, is what I call them, with a child's love and a reverence for his parents in the faith. If we think we now see further than they did in some points, it is only because we are standing on their shoulders, and I hope that will become very clear to you across this study in the first half of this book.

As the Reformers said, the fathers are ours, and these really are our spiritual fathers, and we really do stand on their shoulders because, as we'll see, these men were giants. These men were giants, okay?

Rome and Israel as the Historical Background of the New Testament

So with that, we're going to begin on page 27 with the historical background. And here we have, as the psalm title, the two sources that are the context for the New Testament and the ministry of Jesus, and that is Rome and Israel.

I don't know if that was because people were listening or weren't listening. The context, of course, of Rome and Israel really are the two sources that help explain the ministry of Jesus in the beginning of the church, and that's why Needham is going to address that.

So right in the middle of the page, he says, we need to consider two basic factors to this historical background. The Roman, all right, there we go, we got a few. Some people were sleeping. The Roman Empire and the history of Israel, right?

The history of Israel is important, not only for the immediate context of Jesus and the apostles and the beginning of the church in Jerusalem, but it's also important because the history of Israel carries with it the covenants, the scriptures, the promises of God, all of those benefits that Paul speaks to in Romans 9.

And so it's not just the immediate social context that takes place in Israel, but it's also the heritage of Israel. However, the environment and the sort of global pressure is really from the Roman Empire, thank you, this is more of an adult exercise, I guess, the Roman Empire.

And so notice the points that Nick Needham gives. He says, first, there's a common political loyalty. When you think of the history of Rome, you're thinking 753 BC, little rhyme, 753 BC, that's the historical date to the origins of the Roman Empire.

Rome was ruled by kings until a few centuries later when there was an overthrow of the last Tarkinian king. And ever since then, Rome had become a republic up until the days of Julius Caesar. So the Roman Republic divided power rather than being loyal to a singular king.

The power was divided between two men known as consuls who were the head of the Senate which ruled the people of Rome. So everywhere, in fact, if you still go to parts of the former empire today, you'll notice on street corners or in ruins or even on sewer plates in places in Italy, the initials SPQR, and that is the Latin for the Senate and the people of Rome.

So you get the idea there. That is a very Republican way of understanding power. The Senate split power between the two consuls elected yearly and the people of Rome. And that Republican model falls away when you have the Roman, oh, we're flagging fast, the Roman Emperor.

So Julius Caesar, now we're on page 28, Julius Caesar comes to the fore. Who here has heard of Julius Caesar? All right. I would be terrified about the state of education if most of the adults here hadn't heard of Julius Caesar.

If you've heard of Caesar's pizza, pizza pizza, you've heard of Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar, of course, is very famous. He was the one that ended up sort of putting himself at the forefront of Rome, and he made himself a dictator and therefore a perpetual ruler.

You could actually, in a time of crisis, have the Senate declare someone dictatorial powers until the crisis was averted, and then the power would go back to the two consuls. And so Julius Caesar basically said, there's a crisis, and I'm the dictator for the job.

The problem was when the crisis was averted, he didn't want to let go of those dictators' powers. So Nida mentions the two assassins, Brutus and Cassius. He says perhaps the most famous assassins in history.

And the assassins called themselves, does anyone know what the assassins called themselves? Anyone want to take a guess? How did Brutus and Cassius think of themselves in light of the glorious Republic of Rome that would have no king, if ever there was a no-kings protest, it was Brutus and Cassius.

Do you know how they thought of themselves? The liberators. That's what they called themselves, liberatores. We're gonna liberate the tyranny of Caesar by taking him out of the picture, and then we'll restore the glorious Republic.

But by then, the Roman Empire had gotten a taste for all of the bread and circus of Caesar. It was kind of nice to have a king. It's not mentioned by Needham, but in fact, Caesar was very good to the Jews in Rome.

And so it's recorded by Tacitus that when Julius Caesar was having his funeral oration, the Jews were weeping, and it could be heard throughout the city of Rome. So Julius Caesar was very good at making friends, bringing even barbarians into the Senate.

Really, he was a chaos agent in terms of the Roman Republic. He also was very intelligent to make his nephew, his adopted son, and therefore the heir of his estate, and that would have been Octavian. Octavian goes by another name, according to Needham.

Who knows that name? Joshua. Very good. I remember your paper on the the Roman Republic. Augustus. Now, this name will come up again and again in our study tonight. There's several places where the name Augustus is mentioned.

In fact, Augustus is mentioned right in the New Testament. You have at the top of 29, it was the census that was commanded by Augustus. In other words, he wanted to know, who's in my empire? How many people are there?

And he commanded that everyone go back to the place of their birth so that their names could be recorded. And so when we read Luke chapter 2, Mary, pregnant with the Lord Jesus, and Joseph are traveling to Bethlehem because an emperor in Rome named Augustus commanded that there would be a census.

So that's the political context where the New Testament begins. We'll get back to Augustus as we move on a little bit further into the book. Also, the economy. In other words, as Rome began to expand, as Augustus secured his control, and now the whole Mediterranean world was essentially under the thumb of Augustus, under the thumb of the Roman... well, maybe we'll just abandon this.

Am I the only one? Okay. The Roman Empire. Then trade now was becoming global. In fact, we know from the first century of the famous spice route, and we have Roman artifacts in China and Chinese artifacts in ancient Rome.

There were spices that could only be found in Indian plants that are being dug up in Herculaneum in Pompeii, right? So this is a global economy. Why? Because there's global roads, and the Romans were very good at building roads and water systems.

Why? Because Roman soldiers need to be able to get to the edges of the Empire very quickly, and you need some good roads if you're going to do that. Now, let's just pause here and think about an empire that controls the whole world around the Mediterranean Sea, effectively the only world that matters at this point in history.

The Mediterranean world is the world. That's why Paul can say that Spain is the ends of the earth, right? In his mind, in a Roman way of thinking, that is the ends of the earth. Why is it important that you have all of these road systems and all of these trade networks that have brought about cultural exchange, and you have, as he'll go on to say, Alexander the Great giving a common language?

So you have a language, you have a system, roads, cultures interchanging. Why is that very important providentially for the Gospel? Let's think about that.

Spread very quickly.

Spread very quickly. Is it only going to spread to one culture in one location? Every tribe and tongue. So Augustus thinks, I'm the best thing since sliced bread. But actually, God is using Roman might to pave the way for the Gospel, to actually allow the conditions for the church and the kingdom to advance throughout the Roman world.

So it's really important that we look at God's providence unfolding in the Roman Empire. I think even I missed a few. We'll have to read. That'll be one of the things we revisit and rethink. I mentioned Alexander the Great, and at the bottom of 29 heading on to 30 and 31, he's talking about the influence of Greek culture.

The Romans loved Greek culture. They loved imitating Greek culture. Most of the Mediterranean world would have spoken Greek as a result of the common dialect that came through Alexander's conquests. And so you had a shared language, a market language.

If you were in the upper courts, closer to the first century, you would have known Latin, but you wouldn't have used it. Most of the letters we have, most of the writings we have are in Greek. Latin becomes more commonplace as we head into the later stages of the empire.

And Latin slowly begins to displace the common use of Greek. But the really important thing to understand with that is you have a common language. What language are the New Testament writings written in?

Greek. They're essentially a passport. They can go at just about any harbor, any trading port, to any people. That's market language. That's street language. If you go and you travel to Europe today and you come up to a vendor, that vendor, that hot dog salesman, I don't think they eat hot dogs in Europe, probably for good reasons, but the vendor probably knows six or seven languages.

He knows the languages of the tourists. Who's streaming through, he's going to know their language, right? The common desire and interest in the Greek culture was another way that God was actually allowing the gospel to be able to spread, okay, in the first century.

I'm going to be very quick over this, but Needham talks about four forms of religion in the empire. And again, he's giving a 10 ,000-foot overview. There's a lot more detail and a lot more little side notes we could make along the way.

He does a good job avoiding those bunny trails, and I'm going to try to follow his lead. Essentially, you have paganism, not the belief in the one true and living God, but the belief in a pantheon of gods, many gods.

And really, every force of nature, every form of human experience has its own god. Your family, your work, all of these would have had designated deities. If you were in a certain trade, you would have a patron deity.

There was a god for the metal workers and a god for the silversmiths, a god for the wine merchants, a god for the sailors, and so forth. So you'd have your token deities. You've had your family deity, maybe a particular deity that you would have worshipped and paid homage to that was the god of your family, the god of your ancestors.

And the chief god, overall, was Zeus, or in the Roman term, Jupiter. And underneath Zeus, or the Romans, Jupiter, is all the other gods. The idea is, as he says here, pagan worship involved animal sacrifices, prayer, all these ways of trying to understand the will of the gods.

And that led to some very bizarre and superstitious behavior, right? If you serve these panoply of gods, and as we know from Acts, when Paul goes and preaches on Mars Hill, they're so superstitious about upsetting the gods that they even build an altar to the god that they don't know.

And that's where Paul begins. He says, I'm going to tell you about the god you don't know. I'm going to reveal to you the god that you don't worship, and he's the only one that you should worship. So they're so superstitious about gods that they're involved in animal sacrifices.

What does Jesus say in Matthew 6? These incessant prayers. They think that if they pray a lot, and a lot, and a lot, that the gods will be favorable to them. They also are always trying to understand the will of the gods.

So we have, for example, in Corinth, where Paul planted the church at Corinth, you have the sense that there was a temple to Asclepius. He was the god of healing, of medicine. And if you go to that temple, you find little votive ornaments, little clay pottery of body parts.

And these were given in prayer and in worship to Asclepius. The idea is, if your thumb hurts, you go make a little model of your thumb, and you give that to the temple of Asclepius, and you say, please, Asclepius, heal my thumb.

So what we have are hundreds, if not thousands, of little clay body parts. That's the idea. Or another way you'd try to understand the will of the gods is you'd do what's called augury. Did you notice a bird flying at a certain time?

That's a bad omen. It's not going to be a good day. Or we have another form where you have a priest cut open perhaps a goat or a bull, and you grab out that nasty, deep red liver, and the priest looks at it and tells you what the will of the gods is, right?

This is the kind of superstition that belonged to pagan worship. But it wasn't only pagan worship, middle of 31, there was also emperor worship. Now, this is something foreign to the Romans. And most likely, emperor worship never would have come about if the Roman Empire had not become so mighty.

We've really abandoned Roman Empire. But here's the sentence for it. The Roman Empire is mighty, east and west. Just about as far as you can go, they spread their influence. It's in the eastern cities, the Greek kingdoms and city-states, where the kings had been divinized and worshipped.

And so now the Romans take over, and what do all these Greek people do? Well, they just transfer their worship of their king over to Caesar. We used to worship this king. He got kicked out by Caesar. I guess now we're going to worship Caesar.

You know what? Caesar doesn't mind it. In fact, when Caesar goes over there, when Nero goes over there, he really enjoys it. He kind of plays into it. Now, the Senate does not like this at all. They don't like the idea of imperial worship early on.

But before long, the emperors end up allowing divine honors to be paid to them, and now the Senate is minting coins in honor of the divine Caesars and creating festivities to worship the Caesars. So imperial worship begins in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire.

Now, why is this important for understanding the gospel? If you had some pocket change, in fact, you kids on your sheet, you have some money there on the sheet. That's a Roman coin. There's all sorts of little writings around that Roman coin.

Can I borrow that sheet, Emily, real quick? So you have a Roman coin like this. Here's the head of Nero, and you have this writing, this imprint around his head, and this is Titus Caesar. Now, you have these abbreviations, Imperator, which would be Emperor, Augustus, Filius, so that's the son of Augustus.

Augustus had been divinized. This coin doesn't have it, but most coins would have DF, Divus Filius, son of the divine emperor. And so if you had Roman pocket money, if you were buying bubblegum at your local variety store in the first century, thank you, Seth, you would have in your pocket a coin that said, Caesar is God's son.

Neda mentioned that Augustus had inscriptions throughout his empire. Because he finally put the civil wars to rest, he was the savior of the world. And so you have inscriptions, if you're walking through the forum, if you're walking through places where inscriptions, carvings into stone were offered, you would be walking past things that said things like, Augustus, the son of God, the savior of the world.

Now, what does that sound like? Sounds a lot like what the early Christians were preaching. Jesus is the son of God, and He alone is the savior of the world. We know of inscriptions from Augustus that say, Augustus, who has brought the good news of peace.

Now, what's that word, good news? Does anyone want to take a guess? What's that word, good news, do you think? Gospel. Same word in Greek. Greek inscriptions, Augustus, the one who has brought the gospel of peace.

So you start to understand there is this dimension in which Christianity is a rival to the claims of the emperor. The gospel of Jesus Christ is undermining and at odds with the gospel of Caesar, if we could put it that way.

So you have imperial worship, and as we're going to read at the very end tonight, we're going to read from Tacitus, Nero, the emperors do not like when Jesus Christ is worshiped. And they don't like these abominable Christians who won't go with the flow and pay homage to Caesar.

We have the mystery cults. I'm going to pass over this. This was a fascination. Once you begin with superstition, there really is no end. And you see that where Romans loved to have foreign gods. They loved to worship the gods of the Egyptians.

When new territories were conquered, new gods entered into the pantheon, and mystery cults developed around the worship of those gods. So the Romans loved adding gods to their worship. Then along come the Christians, and the Christians say, no, no, this god, the only god, cannot be worshiped alongside other gods.

He's an all-or-nothing kind of god. In fact, we refuse to worship any god but him. That was a big no-no to the Roman mind. He also mentions philosophy, and this will become important later, so I'm going to largely pass over this now.

But it's important you understand that there was a lot of philosophical underpinnings at the time that Christianity came onto the scene. Those who were literary, those who were writing treatises and books, were of different schools.

There was always some overlap, some things that Needham doesn't get into. But generally, you have three schools of philosophy, and the upper classes, the literary classes, would have been those very familiar with the great literature and great philosophy, and the great ethicists and speakers of the day.

They were very interested and intrigued by these kinds of things. And so the major movements here are, of course, Platonism. If you've ever seen the very famous painting by Raphael, The School of Athens, you have at the very center of it Plato and Aristotle.

And Aristotle is sort of pointing inward and downward to the sort of real, the immediate, and Plato very famously is pointing upward to the ideal, to the transcendent. And that's the idea of Platonism.

It's dealing with the beyond. Now here Needham is talking about Platonism developing toward Middle Platonism by the time of the New Testament. And the important thing here on 34, and this will tie in to where we're going at the end of this study in the Nicene Controversy, Needham, I think, does a good job of summarizing two sticking points for the influence of Plato.

Now you kids should be listening to this because this is one of those pop quiz questions. But the greatest philosopher in terms of his influence and impact in Western history is Plato. And some make the argument too far that early Christian fathers were dependent upon Platonism.

Some say, for example, that Augustine was essentially applying Platonic thought to his theology. And I was at a seminar in November with a professor who was frothing at the mouth at that suggestion, that Augustine was captive to Plato.

But a lot of early church theology was struggling with some of the implications of Plato's philosophy. And Needham gives two of perhaps the biggest influences. So this is from 34, midway through the first full paragraph.

Platonism's extreme emphasis on the sheer gulf between the changing realm of time and the eternal unchanging God, right? This is really important. Middle Platonism is very interested in becoming the process of change toward the ideal.

And for early Christian theologians, understanding God as the unchanging God, the divine God who is outside of time, became a sticking point. So Needham says, this made it difficult for some Christian thinkers to understand how an unchanging God could have entered the world of time by becoming a man in Jesus Christ.

To solve the problem, they were tempted to say that Christ was something less than absolutely divine. How could an unchanging eternal God become subject to time? Subject, as it were, to the succession and the changes of time.

And so this led in part to denying the fact that Jesus is eternally begotten of the Father. And this is what will become the Arian controversy in part, which we'll get to by chapter eight. The other important issue that came out of Platonic thought is this division between the soul and the body.

So Needham says, Platonism's teaching on the superiority of the soul. Here's something pure. Here's something that will actually lead to that which is immortal, that which is ideal, rather than the body which decays and is subject to decay.

And so the physical life held this powerful attraction for many Christians, this idea of having the purity of the soul over against the evil of matter. You can understand why this is such an important issue.

And as Needham says, this leads to Gnosticism, the idea that the body is dispensable, that this flesh and world reality is something actually beneath God's intention and ideal for mankind. Two other schools of thought that he mentions very quickly, Epicureanism.

Epicurus, of course, in ways that line up with Matthew 6, were very, almost like modern day Buddhism, very concerned to overcome the throes of anxiety and fear. And Epicureanism was a philosophy that actually sought to deal with human anxiety and overcome all of the things that cause us to be less than happy and tranquil.

And then Stoicism. This was very important for several leading Roman figures. He mentions Cato the Younger, Marcus Aurelius, the famous Stoicist, mentions Seneca and Epictetus. Seneca, a tremendous writer.

In fact, it was John Calvin who published his first book as a commentary on Seneca. Seneca was a Stoic philosopher, and John Calvin devoted himself to studying his treatise on mercy, De Clementia. So that was Calvin's first published work.

We should understand that the Reformers and even the Puritans were well acquainted with these writers, these philosophers, as even the early Christians were. So we shouldn't think that somehow this is a big waste of time.

Why is Needham introducing all these figures and so on? The church was always grappling and interacting with, objecting, answering, clarifying, and elaborating these men, these worldviews, these philosophies.

The Jewish Background and the Major Groups in Israel

The Jewish background. Getting back into history now. He mentions Pompey. This is not where we get the word pompous, but we might as well. Pompey styled himself Pompey Manus, Pompey the Great. Isn't it great when you can name yourself something like that?

Pompey the Great. And he actually had a little red cape, and he tried to present himself as Alexander the Great. That was the hero of his life. Like some boys are obsessed with Iron Man or Batman or something.

The hero, the superhero for Pompey was Alexander the Great, and he wanted to be a great conqueror like Alexander the Great. And he conquered much of the Middle East in 63 BC, and that included entering into Jerusalem.

And what Rome loved to do was conquer, gain control of resources, and set up a subject kingdom, a vassal kingdom. You pay tribute to us, and we'll give you military aid when it suits us. In fact, we might just conquer you all over again.

It's really, you know, we have the muscle to flex. We'll do what we want. But now we're getting close to the New Testament again. It was a result of civil wars and revolts that broke out in Judea that brought Rome again to install a new dynasty that had control over the Jews.

And here we read of Augustus again. So Luke chapter 2, Augustus is the one who, because of his command, we have Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus. Would Augustus have ever even known of any of the promises or hopes of Israel contained in that?

Likely not. Did he think that anything could overthrow that kind of dominion and supremacy in the world? No. If you read Virgil's Aenid, which Needham mentions, you know, this was the, you know, this was the maximal event of history, right?

Augustus is the guy. And yet it's in this little tiny town of Bethlehem that the true king, the true ruler of the universe, the true bearer of the gospel of peace, the true son of God was being born into time, into space as the fulfillment of all that God had promised.

Augustus puts to power Herod, Herod and Tipiter. The Herods, what a confusing family tree. There's several Herods, but here Herod and Tipiter is enthroned on Jerusalem. And this is the Herod in Matthew chapter 2 that tries to kill all the, all the little boys.

He wants to wipe out the potential of someone who's going to come for his throne. Now, what does that tell you? Let's just pause and think about this. What does that tell you about the prophecies of the Messiah as far as the Jews understood?

Why, in other words, why would Herod try to kill the infant who was prophesied to be the Messiah? Why would Herod try to kill him? He believed the prophecy. All right, elaborate a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

Here's a king whose kingdom knows no end. What does that mean for my kingdom? I can't let that happen. So notice that both here with Herod in the New Testament, just like we talked about the divine Caesar, the son of God, the bearer of peace, where the gospel emerges, it emerges against principalities and powers.

It emerges against the evil empire. That sounds a lot like Babel. That sounds a lot like Exodus. That sounds a lot like the unfolding storyline of Scripture. God showing himself to be the ruler and keeper of his people despite the evil aims of the tyrants and, as it were, the demagogues under satanic possession.

Another thing to point out about the prophecies of Jesus as it pertains to Herod, we essentially have this idea that the Messiah is going to come, and he's going to overthrow all other kings in his power.

And how does that play out with the disciples? So it's not just Herod who believes these prophecies. What do some of the disciples think? They have this thing. Right. Restore the kingdom. Yeah, it's the original miga movement.

Make Israel great again. Get the red hats. Our rulers come. Bye-bye Romans. And Jesus is like, no, not quite. Not quite. My kingdom is a little bit different than the kingdoms of this world. My kingdom is not just one that sits comfortably alongside the kings of this world.

My kingdom is a kingdom that will increase and expand unto everlasting. And it's not by resisting flesh and blood so much as conquering by sword and spirit, the sword of the spirit. So we come back to Augustus, and the last time I'm going to mention Augustus tonight is at the very bottom of 36.

This is important for a few different reasons. It's Augustus who had now placed Judea under direct Roman control, and he installs a procurator, which is a certain form of a governor, and he installs, for a short stint, Pontius Pilate.

Now, we're going to be reciting at the end of tonight the Nicene Creed, and guess who makes an appearance in the Nicene Creed? Pontius Pilate. Again, our faith is a historical faith. The architects, the men who labored over Scripture to create that creed, they understood what they were doing when they put in that name, Pontius Pilate.

This is not some abstract fortune cookie philosophy. Our faith is rooted in history. It's as earthy as marble inscriptions and papyri documents and carved symbols like the anchor on some of the kids' worksheets.

Another thing kids should pay attention to, if they would unscramble the words, they're going to want to have listening ears right now. Moms and dads, actually, I was looking at them like, man, those word scrambles are tough.

Sorry about that, kiddos. I didn't want to discourage anyone, but if you pay attention, I can at least give you a big hint about what we're looking at for some of those words on the scramble. Looking at Israel, we, of course, have several groups or parties that make up Jewish society in a very significant way.

So the first is we have the Sadducees. If you're a word scrambler, you're going to want to remember that, the Sadducees. The Sadducees were elite Jews. They tended to be a minority, but they were a very powerful minority.

The Pharisees far outnumbered them, and yet they retained control over the temple, over the sort of social dynamics at play. They were the elite at the time, largely speaking. The Sadducees were in cahoots, as it were, with the Romans, and they, of course, denied Scripture beyond the first five books, what we call the Pentateuch.

So they had a very limited understanding of Scripture, which meant they rejected a lot of the prophecies that come after Genesis. They were Sadducees because they didn't believe the prophecies. You have to be sad, you see, if you don't believe the prophecies.

No, I've heard that one. We've got to have the dad jokes. The Sadducees also rejected the idea of a bodily resurrection. This, of course, is something that Paul uses to his advantage when he says, I'm a Pharisee, and it's because I'm a Pharisee that I'm being persecuted.

So the court system, the imperial alliances, these were largely borne out by the Sadducees. Paul knew that, and he used that to his advantage. And that brings us to the Pharisees. Again, didn't have direct elite power in the same ways as the Sadducees, but were largely the majority.

Most of the Sanhedrin, of course, was influenced by the Pharisees. And we read in Acts that many Pharisees came to believe in Jesus Christ. So the scribes and the Pharisees largely formed those who were persecuting and mocking Jesus in his ministry.

But many Pharisees come to faith, including the most famous Pharisee to come to faith, Paul, Paul the Apostle. Then you have the Zealots. Of course, as Needham points out, Simon was a Zealot. So Jesus has the red hat mega among his 12.

The Zealots, as we'll go on to say with the Jewish war, largely helped this uprising that led to the Jewish revolt in 66 that culminated with the temple being destroyed in AD 70. And then the last group that's mentioned here.

So again, word scramblers, you want to think Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots, and the Essenes. The Essenes, we have only fragmentary information about them, but this was the community at Qumran. Who here has heard the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Okay, good. That's good. 1947. The really interesting thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is that for much of critical scholarship through the late 1700s, 1800s, and most of the 1900s up until the 1940s, critical scholarship had the idea that what we know to be the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures, all we have are late copies, medieval copies.

And so it's impossible to think that most of these documents go all the way back to antiquity, that these would even predate the first century. These are largely texts that have been developed much later.

And so if you had been a Bible scholar or a professor, you would have been cowed with that opinion, with that research, and for several centuries, this was the prevailing view. And then in 1947, if you held that view, you were a clown, right?

It's the difference a discovery makes. A Bedouin shepherd boy throws a rock into a cave, and here come out all these documents that actually go back to the centuries B .C. as well as some early A .D., and they're still being discovered today.

There's still caves that have documents to bequeath. They're very difficult to access, and so there's still active excavations going on. But you have the Dead Sea Scrolls, and these were copies of Scripture, community documents, applications of Scripture for the community at Qumran, and these were the Essenes.