Transcipt

Jesus' Jewish Roots

Transcript:

(00:01) our topic tonight is jesus jewish roots so the historical jesus we had a lecture on the historical jesus a few weeks ago and the historical jesus was jewish so that jesus was born into a family that was ethno-religiously jewish that shouldn't be surprising or controversial information but unfortunately i think this fact has been obscured and even forgotten by many even observant christians so historians of the historical jesus like for example uh john meyer who has written a long five volume study about uh

(00:42) what we can find out or how what we can possibly learn or know about the historical jesus um try to remind people of the jesus jewish origins and indeed uh meyer's five volume study is actually called a marginal jew so that's his name for jesus as his one of his many biographers so no contemporary portraits of the historical jesus exist so although jesus movement ultimately inspired christianity which became a very powerful and large and the biggest religion in the world and so forth during his own lifetime though he

(01:22) and his followers lacked the importance and the wealth that was necessary in antiquity to create portraits that survive so when we see like this picture i have here is from a sarcophagus in other words someone's coughing it's carved in stone and so forth this is only possible for very rich people the vast majority of the population didn't have this kind of wealth and they weren't making portraits and so forth the earliest christian texts that survive including the canonical gospels they actually fail to give a detailed description of jesus so the gospel of

(02:01) mark doesn't say oh and he had brown hair and you know olive eyes or whatever whatever the whatever it would be the none of those kind of descriptions i thought he was tall or not that's not part of the text at all portraits only become frequent when christianity did become an elite religion in other words when there were enough wealthy christians that they could uh start carving images on the sides of their sarcophague or um when when there are churches or places that could be decorated by wealthier people who could uh commission artists to make portraits and

(02:41) so really the earliest portraits of jesus come from the third and fourth century like this particular one like i say that is from roman gaul and so this is a portrait of jesus the risen christ and you can see the uh the roman couple here are kind of clinging to his legs it's kind of the couple who are probably in the for the sarcophagus in other words who are one or hoping to find seek resurrection um is one of the reasons here so when these roman portraits occur here's another one from another sarcophagus in south the south of france

(03:20) um when they occur they tend to picture jesus as a contemporary roman uh garbed as either like a roman senator or a philosopher in this case wielding a wand so in this particular image jesus here in the middle is in profile and he's got a wand in his hand and he is using that to indicate that he's raising here lazarus who's shown as being very little uh who's coming from the grave so still wrapped in his uh his mummy's mummy like shroud right um and so these earliest pictures you can kind of see in this one and the previous one uh jesus rarely actually

(03:58) has a beard although sometimes the risen christ is bearded so romans are not alone though in depicting jesus like themselves so in other words they're not trying here to try to figure out what the historical jesus would have looked like they're just imagining it based on the kind of character that he was a person who was a teacher a leader and so on and that's what teachers and leaders in roman society look like so for example picturing of jesus who looks like you ethiopian christians ethiopia is one of um most ancient

(04:30) christian nations and they have a long long tradition of picturing jesus here washing the feet of the disciples and all that hear the 12 apostles and so on jesus washing the feet and he looks very much like an ethiopian man as always is the case in ethiopian imagery chinese christians they have pictured here's john the baptist baptizing jesus again using traditional chinese art and traditional chinese looking people medieval europeans like everybody else also pictured kind of a european looking jesus still here um not bearded this is

(05:12) an eighth century uh come of the common era frankish depiction of charlemagne that was commissioned and given to charlemagne so this practice continues so in the movie the passion of the christ kind of controversial movie um there's a pretty let's say european looking uh jesus an american actor his ethnicity is like half half irish quarter swiss quarter slovak um so jesus in this isn't uh there's no attempt here to make the guy look middle eastern or or something like that which may be fine except for if you look at the other characters the

(05:54) villains in the movie where um they are very much coded for jewishness so in terms of how the stereotypes are in terms of noses and and so on uh and so they're not actually jewish actors but they're coded jewish right and so there's an iranian actor here playing herod antipas an italian actor playing anna spenceth so um these are um this is an ongoing problem and a double standard of jewish depiction that is very problematic uh already and unfortunately this double standard uh within the european christian west uh has very very deep roots and it's an all ugly you know violent history uh

(06:36) anti-semitism uh crusades and so on uh pogroms everything uh laws expel expulsions of of the jews massacres all the way up to the holocaust and still continuing to this day anti-semitic [Music] hate crimes and so on continue to the present day and these um are rooted in and have the same kind of sentiment here as is shown in a 13th century english uh book of hours a prayer book and so jesus who is jewish is with other jews here who are obviously they're not all they're they're coded as stereotypes and things like that and

(07:18) actually semi-inhuman uh and jesus isn't one of them really in terms of this in this sense uh in any way in this kind of ugly sense all right there is a long tradition of kind of willful christian ignorance about these kind of things um so lots of people who grow up in the english-speaking world in backwoods churches and so on um just presume that the king james bible which has this very strange way of talking and it's sort of a church speak people sometimes use that when they pray as well and so forth that that maybe is the language actually that jesus spoke so

(08:00) for example in the 1960s um when uh then the prime minister pierre trudeau the father of the current prime minister when he was uh campaigning uh for bilingualism you know the idea that canada has you know what's at that time anyway we have more than two because of the first nations languages but we have um you know for the settlers two foundational languages of both french and english um there was a woman from the parries who uh you know stood up and said you know if english was good enough for jesus christ english is good enough for me uh it's probably not a it's probably an

(08:36) apocryphal story but it's the kind of story that um is told because uh this is kind of an attitude that people um can have and a misconception that people continue to have so so we're just going to say in terms of us and as we're doing this exploration of jesus jewish roots we can say jesus is not an anglo-saxon there have been a number of uh you know there's a number of actually christian offshoots and sects that uh that have actually taught this and you know as a doctrine and kind of in a racist way so anglo israelitism the idea that um

(09:15) that english-speaking peoples and and scandinavians and so on and americans then by their descendants are actually the true lost tribes of israel that's taught by churches like the worldwide church of god a version of that was taught in the restoration tradition although not not as strong doctrine but the idea that um uh mormons will get a patriarchal blessing that says they are from the tribe of ephraim ephraim uh the implication is that there's a their descendants of one of the lost ten tribes and so forth um

(09:53) we talked in our lecture on debunking the da vinci code about the sort of anti-semitic french text that underlies the anti-catholic english text of the da vinci code and that that french conspiracy theory was actually franco um israelitism and the idea that the that the franks the french are the true uh israel again another one of these um you know kind of race-based conspiracy theories turned you know sometimes in some cases religious beliefs so jesus the historical jesus was not an anglo-saxon he wasn't a frank

(10:34) he didn't speak king james english so while a case can be made in christianity to depict christ the christ of scripture in your own culture so there's nothing inherently wrong with the ethiopians making jesus look like them or the chinese making jesus look like them as long as all of the characters you know you know in the in the stories are ethiopian looking right in other words if if it's only um jesus and the good characters in the story who are ethiopian looking and then you do some kind of stereotype looking

(11:10) uh character for judas and herod and so on then you're doing that anti-semitic thing that was going on in both that medieval english illuminated manuscript they were showing the book of hours and of course also in uh passion of christ so herod judas caiaphas and so on should also be depicted chinese in the chinese among the chinese judas i'm sorry chinese jesus okay so who was then the historical jesus um a marginal jewish galilean um i'm saying you're a peasant but isn't exactly peasant not a farmer probably but uh from the um

(11:53) uh vast class of the common people the gospel of mark calls him a carpenter which is to say probably a woodsmith so we think of carpenters as people going out and building houses it's more likely building if it is if that is an actual um bit of data that goes back to the actual historical jesus and not not the invention of mark or someone predecessor of mark the implication of that is that somebody who is let's say fixing like wooden tools or cabinets or these kind of things uh things that you need tools that are made out of wood um you know

(12:32) and so therefore it's a profession that is socially far below the wealthy elites it's maybe above the um the poorest peasants the peasants who don't own any land and are just sharecropper kind of things you know where they're working uh on the land whenever they can for part of the harvest um but less than let's say very rich peasants which there also were um comparative daily rich anyway so the historical jesus uh was from the jewish village of nazareth and nazareth is located in a mixed jewish greek and for lack of a better term anyway serio phoenician which is to say

(13:14) the um aramaic speaking kind of natives of the whole area of syria phoenicia uh canaan you know judea that area so that um uh region of galilee and all of that is under the roman dominion so so he's in a very um kind of multi-ethnic part of the levant so just like we talked about when we talked about the historical jesus from a christian perspective uh it's i think important just as a basis to frame this that there are that christians need to actually separate their conceptions of jesus so people think of jesus christ

(14:01) they have more than one thing in mind so on the one hand they're definitely thinking about the guy the historical figure who like i say in our previous lecture that we had um i think we did a pretty solid job of demonstrating um there certainly it was a historical jesus we can conclude there was a historical jesus with with a great great degree of certainty um but what we can say about the historical jesus with that same great degree of certainty is very small you can say a lot of things from that from that foundation depending on your um reading of the sources and so

(14:39) forth you can go like john p meyer and um decide that lots of things are are can be traced to historical jesus or you can be um like people who are a little bit more uh minimalistic and a little closer to uh like the source criticism and think that well we can't say that with the combat that level of assurance but in any event the historical jesus can only be approached through the academic disciplines of literary criticism and history along with the context you can get from archaeology but there's no remains so there's no nothing really archaeological

(15:17) uh to tell us about the historical jesus other than the context and so um yes while you think of jesus as a guy who lived once and walked around and did things you can't actually know what those things are but for the most part you can only do what you can know with history which is to say an approximation what the most likely things that might have happened what what is unlikely to have happened and so forth that's how you have to approach the historical jesus meanwhile we also then on the other side in christianity have to separate out the

(15:54) jesus christ of scripture then from the christ of theology so in the christian canon there are four canonical gospels and jesus figures into other texts of the new testament and and frankly in the way christians interpret uh the hebrew bible there's lots of passages that christians read jesus into in there too and so those are the portraits that we get in scripture and scripture is used in the life of the church and so both for liturgical religious reasons and things like that and also um to tell teachings and so on uh that

(16:41) are are part of the lived church experience um but again just because it says it in scripture that doesn't mean that that happened that's not the same thing as the historical jesus in fact the the the scripture none of the scripture is our histories or written by historians um and when we've shown that in the last lecture and then finally um the christ of theology within christianity is also very different so the christ theology is a theological idea an understanding of of god and the divine the one god through a second person of god the logos the

(17:18) glory and so forth the risen christ those are the different ways that kind of christians understand god uh it says again different from the historical jesus in the sense that remembering the historical jesus is an academic construct the guy who lived uh is gone in the sense that um no one who was alive uh back then is still alive we have no contact the past is gone you know we only have jesus christ of scripture the christ of theology and what in terms of the historical jesus academic disciplines can

(17:51) show us so these conceptions are not the same they're approached using completely different disciplines which yield very different results and so just be aware of that especially this is especially for christians who are watching all right so let's get back into the academic side of it so there are challenges when we kind of reconstruct the historical jesus so we talked a little bit about this in the last lecture so jesus left no writings jesus left no artifacts or remains there's all kinds of artifacts you'll

(18:26) have everything as we talked about um from the shroud of turin to uh you know the more more splinters of the of the true cross jesus the cross on which jesus is crucified enough to build you know you know whole castle or whatever out of that out of the wood because there's so many of them in other words these are relics that may have a lot of antiquity they may go all the way back to the 4th century in some cases in the most but generally speaking they mostly only go back to the middle ages and so forth

(18:55) and even ones that are like holy blood or any parts of jesus those are not actually have nothing to do with the historical jesus no pre-christian accounts of the jesus movement survive so jesus um you know even the new testament tells us that nobody was calling themselves christian until kind of uh like halfway into the book of acts in other words after the apostles get going after they're planting uh colonies and so or communities around uh the eastern mediterranean and so forth it's only then that christianity is start to being called christianity

(19:37) jesus has a movement but it isn't christian during his lifetime others wouldn't be called christian and it isn't actually very much like the later christian churches that grew up in all the different for and all their different varieties we've had a lecture on early christianities and so almost all of our detailed early accounts of jesus are from christians who introduce anachronisms um they tell the story based on um their own time and place like everyone does and they assume based on [Music] what things are like and how they understand jesus to be in other words the fact that they already have a faith claim and an understanding that jesus is

(20:24) the christ that jesus is the messiah then they reinterpret the past based on that present belief so a bunch of different examples of anachronisms um the book the gospel of john um is probably the most anachronistic the least um uh the historians find that it has the least connections to the historical jesus of the four canonical gospels so in the gospel jesus frequently speaks of the jews as if he were something other than a jew so the author um of the gospel of john actually there's multiple authors are living at a

(21:05) time when their community their early christian community has been kicked out of the synagogues for talking about jesus too much and about other things like that and so now they are becoming separate a separate sect where they don't consider themselves to be jewish and they use the word jews to talk about their former uh co-religionists uh that they're no longer a part of so that's an anachronism so jesus in his lifetime wouldn't talk about the jews at all he's a jew everybody he's talking to were jews so there's not um he would never make that kind of

(21:44) distinction so for example in john 9 22 it records the jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed jesus to be the messiah would be put out of the synagogue so so this is an anachronism this is probably something that occurred in the 80s of the common era and so in something that is very important to the community included the author of the authors of the gospel of john who included this event in their um in their story and said it as happening back at the time of jesus what had happened much more recently and so that's why they

(22:27) think they are already thinking of um their former co-religionists as the other and so they call them the jews as opposed to since they're not calling themselves that anymore so as always the texts reflects the author's context so they're they're unaware of all the changes that have happened in in whatever it's been 30 50 60 90 years and so therefore they continuously retroject anachronisms into jesus's context they're not aware of the context of the historical jesus all right so we have a lot of christian sources the earliest is paul we have the four anonymous canonical

(23:11) gospels there's the other new testament writings there are also non-canonical gospels and writings and then later we have the writings of the early church fathers and all of these are written for purposes other than to narrate history well some of the church fathers eventually are trying to write history but they are also trying to promote the faith while they're doing it so even even the ones who are trying to write history and they're not not actually historians are good historians um they are still nevertheless have their

(23:43) biases as everyone does and so all of the christian sources have to be read in light of christian biases even the sayings that we have that are preserved that go maybe go back to jesus some cases i think lots of them probably do these sayings are not recorded however in their original tongue so jesus would have been as a spoken language would have been aramaic that's what the teachings would have been composed in and preached all the disciples and so on in galilee and in jerusalem would speak aramaic which was the lingua franca of the time people weren't

(24:23) speaking hebrew anymore on a regular basis they might have used it in reading the hebrew torah the hebrew bible but when they would preach they would have spoken their regular language uh that regular language aramaic is a related language it's the language that had been the language of the the babylonians and so on the babylonian empire the persian empire so it's the very related semitic language that overtook hebrew and because you could use it to speak to anybody in the in the kind of middle east in the same way that later arabic when islam spread

(24:58) arabic which is related again semitic language that displaced languages like aramaic egyptian and so forth okay so those teachings were in aramaic that would have gone into oral traditions in other words jesus didn't write anything down and so instead he taught in parables and pithy things things that people could remember they'll have like a three parts or something like that and so they're easy to remember how each one of them kind of goes nevertheless changes could be made during an oral tradition and in the oral tradition we also translate into greek

(25:36) and so then that has to be transmitted orally in the greek speakers until finally the teachings are actually written down in greek in sources attributed to jesus for example in the q sayings gospel mark thomas other sources so the fact that we have so little um primary source material for jesus is actually very very very very normal um people have have lots of people think oh well there's so little about jesus that must mean that he didn't exist we're not going to really we're not going to go back into that but anyway it's actually only a

(26:16) minuscule fraction of people um comparatively you know to today were literate and only a tiny fraction of the records created in the ancient world have survived to the present uh most lives went unrecorded especially members of the lower social orders like jesus and his followers if for the for to even have been recorded then there had to have been somebody to copy it throughout the entire tradition even like important thinkers even you know roman emperors claudius wrote a a history of uh of the etruscans that we'd really

(26:52) like to have if you're interested in etruscan history which i i am and and even though he's the emperor of rome his his book didn't survive uh because uh nobody was around who cared enough to to copy it in the middle ages and so it didn't it didn't make it down to us there's um of what did survive though so i mean this is not only survival this is now also um the notice anybody had so the romans for the romans they had a lot more important things uh galilee and even jerusalem are very much on the frontier of their empire and more or less what they're do what's happening over there it's not they're not too

(27:31) worried about it until they have to have a war about it and so forth and so there's very little that is recorded in the early sources anyway the early roman sources about jesus so tacitus writing in 116 of the common era says there was a movement called christians by the populace christus from whom the name had its origin suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of tiberius at the hands of one of her procurators pontius pilate and so um he knows at least the basics of the story there's a sect in his day called

(28:10) christians they take their name from a guy christ that guy was executed by pontius pilate under tiberius pliny and sueytonius also record of about a crisis as the name of a leader of this movement so just about minimal kinds of minimal kinds of mentions we talked about in the um historical jesus lecture that there are in uh in the writings of the judean historian the jewish historian josephus who wrote books in greek in the first century of the common era that were commissioned by the emperor that there are references that he makes to john the baptist to jesus and to

(28:55) james the brother of jesus which unfortunately have been contaminated or at least the one about jesus has been contaminated uh by the christian copyists and so we read the other two in that lecture the john the baptist won in the james the brother of jesus one because those are the ones that are likely not contaminated but the jesus one is absolutely contaminated there's no doubt that a christian copyist has messed with this one so let's read it so josephus says according to actually he didn't really say this but anyway this is what is in the josephus as it's

(29:29) come down to us about this time there lived jesus a wise man if indeed one ought to call him a man for he was one who performed surprising deeds and he was a teacher of such people as except truth gladly he won over many jews and many of the greeks he was the christ and when upon the accusation of the principle men among us pilate had condemned him to a cross those who had first come to love him did not cease he appeared to them spending a third day restored to life for the prophets had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him and the tribe of christians so called after him

(30:14) has still to this day not disappeared so you can see you know jesus i'm sorry josephus the historic jewish historian did not uh become a christian and so there's no reason to imagine that um you know he'd write more about jesus if he cared this much about jesus but anyway um the idea that he's declaring in the middle of this that he was the christ and he's he's not he's he wasn't even sure if you should even call him a man although although on the other hand a christian probably should because he's fully human

(30:47) fully divine but anyway whatever so this is a then that he's also very much explaining here uh that uh he was resurrected right and that that had been foretold and there's a thousand other marbles all right so um what's what are we looking at here so lots of scholars have pointed out that this is kind of a weird passage where there are all of these kind of christian testimonies but then the christian testimonies in some ways are maybe even arguing with the um the rest of the text and so there was a a wise man if indeed one ought to call

(31:22) him a man so these are like back and forth with each other and so um if we blot out um uh the christian kind of testimonies the if you want to call him a man he was the christ he appeared on the third day restored to life there's all these miracles and so on if we blot those out we have left over something that could very easily be fit into josephus so about this time there lived jesus a wise man for he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as except truth godly he won over many jews and many greeks and when upon the

(32:00) accusation of several principle men among us pilate had him condemned to a cross those who came to love him did not cease and the tribe of christians so called after him has not just to this day not disappeared so it's possible that this is what an original jesus passage uh will look like and josephus then would be saying that he is a a wise man and so maybe a person who is known for as a as a you know as an exorcist that certainly um you know casting out evil spirits and things like that is something that uh and also doing faith healings and so on

(32:35) certainly jives with um uh the christian sources and so on and uh and and like his name his uh the tribe of christians is called after him and so on okay so from all of this and from what we did in our historical jesus lecture we established a kind of a bare bones portrait of the historical jesus so among the details of his life he's a marginal jew from nazareth so he doesn't have that royal genealogy that both the authors of luke and matthew create their own uh different ones that don't actually uh relate to each other uh totally made up

(33:18) from for those uh he is a disciple of john the baptist probably who began to teach his own disciples after john is put to death and after amassing his own following he is crucified by the romans in jerusalem under pontius pilate all right so let's look uh a little bit now at these jewish roots and what does it even mean to be jewish in jesus day this is a model of herod's temple which is herod the great's rebuilding of the second temple as it had been started under under ezra and before him zerubbabel so

(34:00) most of us that are familiar with modern judaism nearly every expression of judaism today there's a couple like the samaritans and a couple others that um uh are are not but almost everything is actually descended of rabbinic judaism in the same way that most of christianity you know descends from nicene christianity uh because so many of those other early christianities have died out and so many of the other types of um uh judaism sects of judaism and so on have also died out so rabbinic judaism took over as the mainstream

(34:42) judaism in the 6th century of the common era and thereafter other ones other sects and versions and variants have died out so begi the rabbinic judaism begins with the early rabbis who are kind of contemporary with jesus in some cases in some cases they're beginning in the generations before that and then continue on uh long after jesus so it's during the second temple period and then the movement evolved in the wake of the roman destruction of jerusalem which destroyed that temple and also the sort of sacrifices animal sacrifices other sacrifices that had been

(35:26) central to what judaism was about so there's only going to be one temple according to the torah and the torah and the temple is going to be there and the religion is focused on that um after that temple no longer exists after the jewish people are expelled from jerusalem in the next generations and the city is refounded as a roman pagan town alia capitalina [Music] diaspora judaism the jews that are in exile everywhere who are not able to have a temple can't have that be their focus and so the rabbis start making torah and torah interpretation now the focus

(36:13) another successor from second temple judaism is christianity which did grow out of second temple judaism it was also impacted by the destruction of jerusalem we talked about how the church that was led by jesus's brother james the brother of jesus james the just sometimes called the poor of jerusalem that they had to flee when the city was destroyed and they went to pella and once they were impella that group um was eclipsed in its importance and became less and less important until it was ultimately declared a heresy by the rest of the christians and eventually went extinct

(36:56) so how is it a successor so understanding their religion to be universal jewish christians like paul who began his life he was born jewish and began his life as a very active um uh pharisee as he says um he began to convert non when he once he converted to uh his own kind of christianity uh he began to convert non-jews to that faith to christianity which then evolved from a jewish sect into an independent religion of the greco-roman world and as it spread beyond the borders of the roman empire to ethiopia and armenia and so on uh the

(37:41) east india and beyond uh it's it becomes its own separate thing although for a whole bunch of time people who aren't christian and aren't jewish the pagan romans kind of still thought of the christians as being some kind of kooky newfangled jews for a while and anyway uh you know that happens all the time so so um i want to just look then just a chart of what we've just been talking about continuity and innovation in judaism i've made it's kind of a timeline here that is more conceptual but i've divided the the main line here

(38:15) between first temple judaism second temple judaism and then rabbinic judaism so first temple is that temple that traditionally is built by solomon whether there actually was such a king or not but in any event was the uh the temple when um uh religion in the kingdom of judah is is formalized and centralized at the end of the kingdom so that um that is destroyed with by the babylonians in 586 bce with the destruction of the first temple then in 516 the exiles return they build the second temple which exists until 70 of the common era 70 a.d when the romans

(39:08) then destroy the second temple that's the second temple period and then in the wake of that the rabbis try to put the pieces together they compose over the course of a few hundred years the talmud and eventually become the mainstream of judaism rabbinic judaism which exists to this day so um out of that the samaritans um come from a split that occurs essentially at between the first and second temple periods so the samaritans are people that stay in the land when the exiles are taken away to babylon and when the exiles come back

(39:51) the exiles don't want the samaritans to have anything to do with them and so they become their own separate sect essentially their own separate religion ultimately and then likewise we mentioned out of the second temple period christianity is its own thing beginning as a jewish sect which i'm calling here the poor of jerusalem maybe james is james the brother of jesus group and at the same time as that there are other sects the most famous of which are the sadducees the pharisees and the essenes the essenes and the sadducees like the

(40:30) poor of jerusalem kind of get wiped out with the destruction of jerusalem and the wars that follow uh the pharisees live on and in some cases sort of evolve into the rabbis in some ways in some ways they're a little different and of course now we kind of are aware of in the modern times in the north america anyway there are other sects and in israel but the reform conservative and orthodox groupings that occurred in modern times in judaism as branches all right so i want to talk a little bit about the kind of influences throughout all of this time and this is

(41:14) a very quick thumbnail but i think it might help to put a little bit of this context uh put a lot a little bit of the background into context so the levant this area syria palestine judah um the aramaic speaking zone uh is um uh at a crossroads so it's a crossroads between uh africa and egypt and asia and specifically between the much bigger um lands and civilizations of mesopotamia assyria and babylon on the one hand and egypt on the other hand and so in that first temple period the iron age kingdoms of israel and judah are quite little and powerless in

(42:04) a way in the faces of these they have a lot of cultural flowering but it's very hard to for a place that has such a small hinterland to imagine it like taking over egypt or it taking over assyria or babylon whereas the assyrians and babylonians and egyptians are much more able to muster much larger armies and take those over and so egyptian power and influence are affecting the iron age kingdoms of israel and judah in the first temple period as are the mesopotamians so when the mesopotamians destroy the

(42:38) two kingdoms what ends up happening is the first temple's destroyed the samaritans stay in the land but exiles flee to egypt and those become egyptianized and others the captives are taken away to the babylonian captivity or they are babylonianized and so there are big uh influences that happen with the two uh diaspora groups and now for this from this time onward the majority of jews actually are not going to be living in the land so they're going to be in these diaspora communities which is where the religion really takes off um

(43:16) even though the religion has been focused on the temple and even in this moment when there's no temple it's still kind of focused on getting back and making a temple nevertheless the religion is really experienced and really takes off in exile in these diaspora communities so duri when the persians conquer the babylonians and let the exiles go home to rebuild the second temple the second temple has a is now has lots of mesopotamian persian and uh mesopotamian persian influence because it's not an independent kingdom it's a little province under the persian empire

(43:57) and the per and the people have started speaking for example aramaic and so on and they are and and even the the the the king is not a king but anyway the um the descendant of the ha from the house of david the last descendant who goes back to lead the people there zerubbabel has an actual babylonian name even so he's even adopted you know doesn't even have a hebrew or jewish name anymore so there are a big community of diaspora jews at this point still in egypt but their influence is less during this

(44:30) whole persian period that stretches from the return in 516 through till 332 bce so the persian district is much smaller and reduced from the former independent kingdom of judah the persian era of jerusalem is tiny so there's maybe 500 to 15 inhabitants the receiving exiles like i say rejected the local local israelites who remained in the land calling them impure and they created a rivalry with those especially the ones that were in charge of the neighboring district of samaria and that became that origin of that

(45:07) jewish samaritan split we were talking about okay so the next period alexander the great conquers the whole persian empire and this now suddenly introduces greek influence and so persian and mesopotamian influences very much wanes now because now the influences from this hellenizing empire of alexander and alexander's successors and i'm still going to say egyptian influence which was on the on the rise again because now um alexandria the city founded by alexander to become the new greek capital of egypt

(45:47) becomes the cosmopolitan and intellectual and cultural capital of the hellenistic world and so and this place already like i say has a bunch of diaspora jewish population and a certain point the jewish population there is probably there are more jews there than anywhere else in the in the world so that has a an influence uh on the people that are back in the kingdom uh in the land what's originally a uh provinces of the um of the successor empires under the greek empires under uh alexander's successors

(46:23) so the antigonids and the and the ptolemies but later it becomes an independent short-lived independent states under the maccabees uh the hasmoneans as they're called the hasmonean dynasty that dynasty though and well we'll get to it here so the maccabean revolt takes off in 167 uh bce so antiochus iv the seleucid king of syria forbids jewish worship and practices and he sets up an idol to zeus in the jerusalem temple that causes a revolt so the revolt is led by members of the hasmonean family beginning with a rural priest named matthias uh and it's followed by his son judah

(47:02) maccabee the hammer and so that's why these guys are known as the maccabees um kind of popularly although it's usually the family is called the hasmoneans and that revolt is the origin of the hanukkah celebration that people are familiar with so from there the hasmonean kingdom grew as both the especially the seleucid kingdom fell into decline so the hasmoneans the maccabees are not davidic and so they didn't have the um the right lineage to be uh to to be called the messiah as far as the hebrew bible was currency earned nevertheless they are the kings they're

(47:41) also not of the zadokite or sadducee line of priests but nevertheless they ruled jerusalem as both high priest kings which caused their rejection from some of the other priests those priests then who left the jerusalem elite and they went to the side of the dead sea where they founded a colony in qumran where they made it kind of a counter protest movement kind of thing waiting for a true king to emerge and so forth messiah essentially so by um 116 bce the hasmoneans had achieved full independence from the seleucid kings these hellenistic people kings of syria and their independent state was

(48:25) maintained from 116 to 63 so kind of a short-lived time period when it was conquered by rome so the territory ruled by the hasmoneans is it decidedly mixed so there's a judean jewish corps in judea a kind of an anti-jewish samaria and then there's also kind of mixed syrian israelite areas in idumea which is the south edom and then in galilee in the north so the israelite groups present in the first century at the time of josephus the sects or schools he cited are the pharisees the sadducees and the essenes these all emerged during

(49:09) this hasmonean time and as i mentioned qumran where the dead sea scrolls were found this was founded in the late hundreds in the uh in the bce by priests uh opposing hasmonean rule all right so that gives us this is the last of these maps but essentially um with now the romans conquering the greek east including the hasmonean kingdom and egypt now suddenly greek and roman influence is very big on the diaspora romans actually rule in the land including uh when uh the hasmoneans are replaced by the herodian kings uh which are puppet or client kings of the romans and so again there's

(49:56) mesopotamian persian influence and a big diaspora population in babylon and so on but that these are a smaller during this time period again hellenization has been a major force for centuries by the time of jesus's birth so herod's kingdom when jesus was born or depending on when jesus was born a little bit a little bit before jesus was born depending on when he was born but according to the gospel of matthew anyway when jesus was born the kingdom was a client of rome uh ruled by a king who was neither hezmonian nor davidic

(50:33) and so nobody was really happy with him except for king herod and the romans who he served but herod actually did become amazingly rich and he was the greatest builder of the region's history so he um almost all of the oldest stuff that's around in israel and palestine and and so on uh is is actually built the oldest stuff is built by herod there's been stuff obviously bit since then by everyone to from the crusaders to the ottomans and so forth so after um after his death the romans divided his inheritance herod the great rebuilt the second

(51:13) temple on a grand scale and this became this was as it already was the central focus of jewish worship in that era so we talked about these three schools cited by josephus the sadducees the pharisees and the essenes so who are they so the sadducees were the sect of the hereditary nobility under the hasmoneans they lost control of the high priesthoods in other words that hasmonean dynasty took over the high priesthood nevertheless they remained in jerusalem as the priestly noble elite in general they were conservative

(51:56) they had a more literal interpretation of torah and they specifically liked torah and not the other books of the hebrew bibles in other words the pentateuch the first five books they reject the idea that there's also an oral torah and the different doctrines that the pharisees have we'll talk about what those are so the pharisees are the sect of uh the scribal class it's it's always tempting to want to say you know to do to rej you know interject uh retroject anachronisms of you know the upper class and middle class and so on

(52:31) um they didn't there wasn't middle class back then but anyway these are they're still an upper class because it is very much everything is still you know quite elite and not but anyway the scribal class were very learned in torah interpretation sometimes they're called rabbis many people see the pharisees as maybe the origin of kind of the rabbi rabbinic movement the pharisees emphasized purity law although not as extreme as the essenes will as we'll see next and they came up with an idea that there

(53:03) was an oral torah which is to say at the same time that the five books of moses uh and the ten commandments and so on were were given to moses that there was also a whole bunch of tradition that was not to be written down that was just to be passed down and that allowed them or gave them the ability to update interpretation of the torah for the present day and so they're very interested in interpretation and then there's a sect that lived apart um the essenes so the essenes also claim to be the zatakites like the sadducees but rather than staying with the hasmoneans and the herodians and the

(53:48) romans and ruling uh they they leave society so they uh pull away they probably again are the founders of qumran so the dead sea scroll place that's probably an essene uh center they live together in a sort of like almost like what we think of as maybe a most monastic way a strict priestly ascetic lifestyle according to kind of strict interpretation of jewish laws purity laws and they considered for example the pharisees to be very very lacks in their interpretation in general uh they're apocalyptic and restorationists so they want uh they see the current order as being

(54:29) um uh in in apostasy essentially and they're looking forward to a savior who was going to you know overturn everything and restore the proper order okay so going back to the sadducees what are their beliefs so the statuses according to josephus believe very strongly in free will and reject the idea of punishment and rewards after death they can't find anything about that in the torah the torah actually has very little on on afterlife or heaven and hell these are uh largely ideas that have entered into

(55:09) second temple judaism especially probably during that persian period from all of that persian and babylonian influence they reject uh resurrection and the immortality of the soul again that's non-biblical uh resurrection is certainly part of zoroastrianism uh it's um the religion of the persian empire and so on they also reject the idea of spirits and angels so all of the angels that keep appearing to apocalyptic prophets like uh who are showing visions of heaven and so on the sagitties are not interested in any of that stuff the pharisees by contrast again these

(55:53) guys are the specialists in the law they are very open to interpretation and they have a nuanced view for example uh that free will uh in that free will dime uh divine omnipotence divide so uh here's it's encapsulated here in a saying of rabbi akiva who said all is foreseen but freedom of choice is given so um we were talking about this as kind of central to um you know kind of this this question of free will and determinism um for christians throughout all of uh theology and all of history is if god is is timeless and is beyond time and is

(56:35) also all-knowing and knows what everything is going to happen all is foreseen but here freedom of choice is given in other words just because god knows what's going to happen doesn't mean that you aren't still freely choosing that even though you're like how does that work okay well i mean it's still it's that nuance has been hard to uh figure out the mechanism of for thousands of years but it's all the way back here with the rabbis so they believe in resurrection eternal rewards and punishment spirits angels and so forth

(57:06) finally the essenes so these are those ascetics that are off waiting for the apocalypse they believe in immortality but they're very fatalistic in their emphasis and that everything is occurring according to god's will they like i said like aesthetics do reject pleasure and live a kind of a strict communal life compared we might compare with later christian monasticism when christian monks go off into the desert and so forth to create communities and they're very apocalyptic so they believe that messiah's saviors are going to restore the pure practices in the temple where it should be practiced as

(57:41) opposed to where they're having to practice it on the shores of the dead sea so i want to look at jesus connected to each one of these as we kind of begin to wrap up here so jesus and the sadducees so the sadducees are the nobles um uh jesus is not a noble he's not a sadducee um in the gospels as we have them uh you know there's multiple attestation anyway that that jesus is in conflict with the sadducees our most likely picture of jesus beliefs include things like resurrection and eternal reward and punishment as well as the idea that they're spirits and angels

(58:24) and so those are all things that the sadducees don't believe in so that's not um doesn't seem like and again there's much overlap between him and them and jesus is especially concerned with the poor and the marginalized and he's condemning the elite woe unto you rich blessed are the poor and so on well the rich are the sadducees so um he's saying woe unto them especially and so forth so he's not part of that group although he's reacting to it right so let's look at the essenes so the essenes as i mentioned they're apocalyptics they believe that messiahs

(58:59) are coming saviors are going to come so jesus obviously has his movement and also with the gospels as we have it there's apocalypticism it's certainly a messianic religion as jesus ultimately is understood to have been the messiah and therefore the christ that seems to align with the essenes kind of generally it may not be in their particulars so we know a lot about the essenes because of the dead sea scrolls and they believe in all kinds of different things that are not particularly fully lining up with uh with christian texts so jesus first followers as we mentioned

(59:42) led by his brother james the poor of jerusalem as we've called them they had an intentional community where they strictly lived the law and held all things in common probably um that's what anyway is described and remembered in the in the new testament texts and james is remembered as james the just in the sense that he is very rule-abiding and indeed his his conflict with paul was over whether jewish law needed to be incumbent upon christians where james believed it did so um so those uh those are the essenes are also very interested in jewish law although

(1:00:23) they may have a stricter or different interpretation we'll we'll see so jesus seems to have rejected asceticism so asceticism is when you uh do all kinds of let's say fasting and um or giving different things up i like living in that kind of way like a monk so uh there's a line of criticism from from the sayings gospel q that's recorded in uh uh it was remembered in matthew and luke you know that that the son of man came um uh drinking you know and uh anyway the idea of it is is that he's not fasting uh is being criticized for not fasting the way john the baptist fast and so

(1:01:07) forth and so you usually when there's negative criticism from a positive source it's more likely to be correct so more likely to go back to him so anyway we're not sure but it does seem like although christians later are ascetics it's not necessarily clear that the historical jesus was that's what i'm trying to say so it's possible though a lot of people have made the case that john the baptist isn't a scene so the better case can be made for that so unlike jesus john was an ascetic so he separated himself from society he went off and lived in the wilderness like the essenes did in the same kind of area by

(1:01:47) the river jordan they're a little bit south of there he's active near there and like qumran where there is a lot of focus on um mikv washing mikbah bathing which is a a in a jewish custom that causes alleviates ritual impurity but it has to be done many many times john does repurpose that idea to teach a kind of a new what becomes the christian idea of baptism which is more of a not ritual impurity but a one-time spiritual cleansing that is what john is even known for being a baptist so his practices you know differ from what we understand of

(1:02:35) the essenes but there's some things going on that are tantalizingly close there's no way to make the case conclusively i think one way or the other it's just a tantalizing connection so what about being being a pharisee um in the gospels jesus spends a lot of time with rivals who are pharisees like the pharisees he's often called rabbi which is to say master teacher master in the gospels like the pharisees jesus is pertained as an expert learned in torah who argues based on biblical law and he also shares a lot of beliefs with the pharisees including the resurrection spirits and angels

(1:03:17) so there's a lot of um there's a lot of things that jesus is concerned with and background at least as we have him portrayed in the gospels that seem a lot like his rivals who the gospels see as in a negative light the pharisees and we also know that some of jesus's followers so paul is a pharisee before he is converted so it's hard to say so there's some tantalizing things i would say like here's an example here's a counter example so in the gospels jesus is portrayed as seeming to have rejected the kind of the central doctrine of

(1:03:53) pharisees the the oral torah so you read this clip uh quote and this comes from mark chapter 7. when the pharisees and some of the scribes who'd come down from jerusalem gathered around him jesus they noted that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands that is without ritually washing them for the pharisees and all the jews do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands thus observing the tradition of the elders and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it and there are also many other traditions that they observe the ritual washing of cups pots and bron bronze kettles

(1:04:32) you can see that even here already by the time that we're having the text of mark mark is assuming an audience that doesn't understand jewish law or custom and so even already by by the year 70 christianity here is diverging a lot from its jewish roots but anyway it still knows about them but it's having to explain what's going on here so the pharisees and scribes asked him they asked jesus why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands he said to them isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites as it is written this people

(1:05:11) honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me in vain do they worship me teaching human precepts as doctrines you abandon the commandment of god and hold to human tradition and so this last line here you abandon the commander in the word of god which is to say let's say written scripture and and rejec and and you hold to human tradition uh which is to say maybe the oral torah he seems to be saying in this anyway a kind of a condemnation of one of these pharisaic tenets central ones nevertheless the pharisees argue with

(1:05:46) each other all the time so it doesn't mean that that doesn't make you not a pharisee even if you anyway you're in this environment whatever so what i want to say is so if you we are in um in north america here and we're looking at judaism pretty much we have uh the three major denominations within judaism uh reform conservative and orthodox that are making up kind of a third each with orthodox maybe a little less and reform a little bit more and pretty much everybody who's jewish who's religious anyway i mean there would be people who are not religious jews who are simply ethnic or

(1:06:27) cultural jews who maybe don't think of themselves as one of these pretty much everybody kind of fits into one of those denominations these sects though that josephus is talking about in the first century these really only refer to a very tiny group the elites and the people who were immediately influenced by them and so forth whereas almost everybody else the vast majority of people who would have identified as jews or who would be identified as jews wouldn't really be one of these schools or sects and so there's plenty of room

(1:07:03) in there for um you know jesus's group if it's like the poor of jerusalem to be its own little sect that is not important enough to get mentioned much more than you know other than a couple times by uh not as certainly one of the major sects though uh by josephus and so on so let's conclude so jesus in the context of simple to second temple judaism so although he may not have been a member of one of these leading schools as identified by josephus jesus was nevertheless grappling with those same issues that they were so all

(1:07:39) the things that are that are on the table that they're arguing about the sadducees the essenes the pharisees back and forth with each other this is also the things that jesus and his disciples are thinking about and to understand the historical jesus therefore he has to be seen within the context of his jewish roots all right that's the formal conclusion of the lecture but now let's have some discussion take a water water first and so as always um when as we're kind of as leandro is uh assembling questions and sending those to me um i also have some discussion questions

(1:08:22) for you to be thinking about and you can chime in with any of these any thoughts or reflections you have on these so can you think first number one can you think of other examples of how jesus responded to his context of second temple judaism so you know this could be the jesus of scripture if you're thinking about um stories that you know how are those related to that context number two what are some portraits or depictions of jesus that stick out in your experience and so this can be even 21st century portraits if you're thinking about it or

(1:09:01) depictions and so on um i was we've done a whole range of them i've showed everything from chinese to ethiopian jesus and also the mel gibson three what can or should christians do to overcome historical legacies of mistreating and obviously much much much worse our jewish cousins all right and so i'll let you think on those as i'm gonna start to uh get questions from you all right so uh godward podcast asks weren't there synagogues and a diaspora before the temple was destroyed uh if so why the torah didn't suggest

(1:09:49) that so so yes so as i was saying that um there's a diaspora there's a diaspora when the first temple's destroyed so to your point to your question from from the destruction of the first temple to the destruction of the second temple even though we call that the second temple period because again the focus is on that the majority of the jewish people are going to be living in the diaspora and the diaspora is um uh and you know so it's like egypt and and mesopotamia especially but also across syria and then really

(1:10:29) by the roman conquests and the hell the jewish colonies uh jewish merchants and so on go through um a lot of the roman world so there's a lot of um uh there's a big diaspora community so why are there synagogues even if they're not in the torah and so synagogue is a it initially means it's kind of almost the same word is i mean this is a greek word but it's almost the same word as as as ecclesia and church and so on which is a community and gathering and uh the and and in these different communities it's initially not a building it's initially kind of a gathering to get together

(1:11:12) [Music] as a community when you are way too far away from from the temple and so even though even though the religion especially as it's practiced very close to jerusalem is trying to always centralize in fact um like the bulk of the members don't live anywhere where they can let's say easily go to jerusalem so some of them will make a pilgrimage there at a high holiday or something like that but generally speaking they're planted all the different places they've been ever since the kingdom of jerusalem the kingdom of judah was

(1:11:53) originally destroyed by the babylonians so why are they there they've been there and since they've been in exile and most of them don't ever go back uh to the land in the same way that um there's still a diaspora community today even though many jewish people have moved to the land and are now part living in the state of israel there's plenty that are living here in toronto okay dionysus infinitum says if jesus himself preached about god why have modern christians seemingly deified jesus as god what caused the apotheosis of jesus well so um

(1:12:39) so what ends up happening is again that happened uh before we have we have the writings right and so what ends up happening is that uh jesus is a leader in a movement probably i'm just making my own reconstruction here he's uh crucified under pontius pilate um uh there isn't a big trial that you know is not a big enough person or important enough to have a trial there isn't a uh there isn't likely to be a tomb at all otherwise the tomb is a later apologetic in order to um in order to answer questions to prove that there was a resurrection and so forth that the apollo christian apologists have

(1:13:19) but what ends up happening is his disciples are scared and then they flee in the face of roman authorities they don't really know what happens to the guy he's thrown into a common grave the way everybody who's crucified is and and then after that some of jesus's disciples start having visions of the risen christ and so and so because of that maybe people maybe you know again one of his uh important maybe the first being his very important uh female apostle mary magdalene and then maybe some of the other apostles uh peter and the twelve and uh and his brother james and so

(1:14:04) forth um they have visions of jesus and they start to see jesus as having conquered death and so they see him as resurrected and maybe sitting at the right hand of god and so forth so from that then then other apostles like paul really kind of take off from there and develop a very high christology so he has a vision of the risen christ as well and his testimony is that jesus is the glory of god the logos of god so um this is already a concept that exists within uh within judaism the second temple uh you can't uh experience uh the first person of god essentially you

(1:14:51) can't experience the the creator who is unknowable and unseeable but you can like a prophet can experience uh uh and see in god's glory and so the glory is what is um uh the the perceptible you know the perceptible god and anyway and so paul's testimony is you must you have to believe that christ is uh logos uh that you know jesus is lord adonai that's what the the word is anyway used for glory so um so anyway the devout the idea of it is that um uh that that develops fairly fast uh in terms of uh understanding the risen christ as the um

(1:15:42) the the lord as god's glory or logos so that's what caused it um bob garrison would jesus recognize judaism judaism as it exists today um jesus the historical jesus um i mean i don't think we'd be able to recognize much of anything that we have today as as um uh as being very related to life in the first century of the middle east and the roman empire and so on um i would say there are certainly things within judaism that are that are that is the same um they were some of these uh interpretations and the way jewish law was starting to be practiced uh that was kind of being theorized in his time and

(1:16:32) starting to move from just priests only to the people more general generally certainly the um the texts are exactly the same uh the central text obviously there's new texts that have been added that the talmud and so forth but the you know the torah the hebrew bible is exactly the same so he'd certainly recognize that part um uh the fact that there are are scholars of bible rabbis uh that certainly would be still familiar so so i'd say that there's a bunch of it that would still be familiar probably more familiar than anything about

(1:17:09) christianity although you know we use the same bible in translation and so forth there's some parts of it that are would be the same certainly probably some of jesus's own teachings have survived into christianity lots of them and so therefore that would be familiar to him too sean lancaster how much of jesus's anti-law actions teachings do scholars think are historical uh versus later anti-jewish propaganda of gospel writers um yeah that that's going to be depending on your kind of uh model of how you

(1:17:48) understand the historical jesus and so um we we read um we read that part of the gospel of mark i kind of gave a long excerpt where um uh other sects the pharisees and so forth are complaining uh about lack of you know you know lack of purity uh obligations you know not washing in terms of the cups and so forth um and jesus uh supporting that kind of let's say more laxer or relaxer or rather more spiritual interpretation so in other words um christians there's a there's a there's a spectrum here and christians

(1:18:36) sometimes stereotype uh judaism as being just concerned with legalism and not interested in the spirit of the law and and that's certainly part of the the christian teaching that's here but christians can be very legalistic too and actually jews can be very interested in what the spirit of the law is too so it's not it's it's not a it's not a black and white issue rather um whenever you're talking about let's say law and you're talking about interpretation and you're talking about literalism versus the spirit of it this kind of a spectrum

(1:19:14) and so christians are probably a little bit more into the we're not going to do all of these uh things you know x y and z especially not with jewish law but we're instead going to um say you know there are there's pure the um the spirit of this is not um whether we are ritually clean uh the spirit of it is whether we have um kindness in our hearts and so forth whether we're actually helping widows and so forth so um how do we know which one which one is it so so it it may well be it seems like considering it's so central to the tradition that jesus is in the spectrum

(1:19:55) and he's arguing kind of more for the spiritual component of it but and like you say it's also completely possible that depending on your interpretation of it that that that that since that's kind of more where christianity went um it's not it's not it's not dissimilar so the the criterion of dissimilarity doesn't help and so so when um you know so when christianity is going a particular direction that's uh then it's less like we're less able to say that jesus did that because we know the christians did that and they'd want

(1:20:29) to write it like that so the answer is it's very hard to say so i would kind of weigh it both ways on that catherine mary grangine asks you refer to the torah but what about the other books that we call the bible jesus quotes isaiah so he must have studied it so yeah i um when i was talking about torah especially i was thinking because the uh because the sadducees especially were interested in that but there's um but but the hebrew bible itself satoru is just the five books attributed to moses the pentateuch is called in uh in the greek in the christians um so

(1:21:09) um that's torah and then there's also the prophets and the writings and so for the hebrew bible that's the tanakh which is pretty much the same as the in terms of the number of books and so forth as the protestant old testament so not the apocrypha and so on um so the other books are are important to uh jews of the time especially the pharisees the essenes and so forth they're very interested in those the sadducees may be less so the other books um they're kind of making more focused on that um uh so um what about those are the books so those are the books are important so like you say jesus quotes isaiah and so

(1:21:54) at the very minimum what we'd say is that the understanding of jesus by the time we get to the gospel writers is that jesus is learned in as a student and studies the whole hebrew bible not just the torah and is interested in the whole hebrew bible certainly uh for early christianity isaiah especially really informs um you know kind of christian understanding of a lot of the a lot of these kind of issues if you go back and read isaiah there's a lot of already the kind of condemning of legalism and so on that's

(1:22:33) already in isaiah and so forth okay daryl scott comments john you should try to do a guest episode on the useful charts channel i would love to do a guest episode on useful charts useful charts is a fantastic channel um and uh it's it's kind of a crazy i've got a lot of things in common with um the host of useful charts so the the host of useful charts um one he makes charts i also make charts so we're both kind of chart makers um two he comes from uh an interesting background so i was talking about anglo-israelitism and i was talking about the history of that

(1:23:13) worldwide church of god and so and so the useful church guy grew up in um in in that church uh the worldwide church of god or actually an offshoot of that uh and and then left it and then converted to um reform judaism and so um anyway and so which is a very progressive um uh religion that i consider to be a sister faith from to our uh very progressive uh denomination that we have and so um and as in the same way uh grew up in the lds church and ultimately converted to community of christ to a very progressive um christian church from a church that

(1:23:59) believes in all kinds of of uh literalistic and problematic falsifiable stuff like the worldwide church of god does so yeah i would love to do that hopefully i'll get to meet him someday and we'll have a do a crossover or something okay edie lewis reviews asks where does this um where did this concept of oral torah originate and how did it come down to the pharisees oh and then rayne webber also says by oral torah does he mean the mishnah the babylonian talmud or something more inco um and so so so the mishnah and the talmud are not written

(1:24:43) in jesus time and so the idea of it is yeah that there is later the oratory is written and so then um and so then it's not oral as much anymore right but this is an idea that is being formulated by uh the first rabbis here and potentially the pharisees and that they are their their um their pretense is that there is supposedly an oral tradition in the schools um that uh where it's being passed down to them from moses uh this is not a um uh anyway this is not a i mean when we did this myth versus historicity um lecture with the

(1:25:30) historical jesus um we mentioned how the uh the time period from even moses to when the torah is written much less from moses to when the talmud is written or the mishnah is written it's already too long to preserve for you know moses to torah and that's why moses is not even a historical figure moses is a myth right and so same thing um so how do you get a oral tradition to be truthfully transmitted or you know perfectly transmitted um you know for the whole whatever that is a couple thousand years all the way back to a mythical figure

(1:26:10) who didn't say it in the first place it's not a claim that has any historicity to it uh it may well still be understood as a as a faith claim but um um anyway it uh where it comes from is it's something that um the scholars of this time are are theorizing about and ultimately it becomes kind of central to um how the rabbis start formulating it and writing it and and more important than whether there is such a tradition which i've just said there isn't or argue that there isn't um rather it's it informs a tradition of

(1:26:48) of um of having debate all the time and so of the um uh even of rabbinic judaism being a dialogue uh based religion that even allows the rabbis to argue with you know torah and ultimately with god there more okay okay sean lancaster asks would paul and tarsus and jesus and galilee be more exposed to variant forms of judaism such as samaritan practices than those in jerusalem did jerusalem extend influence that far um so so jerusalem does extend influence especially if um jesus at least we know i mean certainly in the tradition he goes to jerusalem a few times in four

(1:27:52) uh different high holidays and and so on and certainly that's where according to you know it's a bunch of con um [Music] where he got killed right and so he does go there so galilee isn't so far away that you can't i mean not everybody travels right but anyway that it does seem like an itinerant um band of uh disciples and so forth are able to get between the two and go there at least occasionally and so forth and jerusalem is um exerting influence because at different times you know the the areas that even include um samaria and galilee are either part of you know

(1:28:36) herod the great's kingdom or um various herodian uh kingdoms of his different uh you know extended clan that descend from him excuse me one sec okay but paul in tarsus so he's up in cilicia so that's much more um removed diaspora um you know he's paul is still apparently up on you know these different sects i think he calls himself um you know a pharisee at some point and before he converted he's he's very uh interested in the law and also paul even though he's from cilicia he does he's down in the the area um because he's

(1:29:20) he's in the area of jerusalem and damascus and so forth in at a certain point so so paul is maybe more connected i guess what i would say is there's going to be a lot of hellenistic judaism greek judaism that is going to be much more influenced by what let's say this massive jewish community is doing in alexandria than maybe what the leaders are doing in jerusalem so the leaders in jerusalem are kind of focused on their own thing they're receiving tithes and offerings and things like that from all around and visitors and pilgrims but they are

(1:30:05) communicating back out in in aramaic and so it is not really getting maybe to this whole western diaspora of kind of greek speaking uh judaism which is big and important and so that's very very different in terms of the samaritans they're also really intertwined in terms of the local geography what you know jesus interacts with the samaritans in the gospels what we can kind of say is that by the time of the john's gospel is written a bunch of samaritans have also become christians and so been joined into this community which has gotten kicked out of the jewish synagogues and so

(1:30:47) and so samaritans are are kind of making and some samaritans were making common practice some of the jews were too and becoming christians and so forth so there is some interaction okay god word podcast how much of greek culture might jesus have encountered could you have heard of heraclitus for example as people came and went around judea so um you know how much is is is kind of really open to speculation he could have he could have known greek you know for all we know i mean but anyway there's no particular reason to think he could but

(1:31:23) um but nazareth is like over a hill away from uh you know some very big greek colonies greek speaking cities um you know that are that are the metropolises of the political elite um and so it was it's completely possible that um people in galilee of the working class you know actually went to do work on building some of those uh cities and so forth um you know how much it's it's hard to say i mean in terms of greek culture the the area galilee and so forth and actually the whole area you know it has already been more than three centuries of

(1:32:06) hellenization um we talked about uh you know those maccabees uh the hasmoneans who led that revolt against the seleucids the greek kings of syria because of the trying to forcibly hellenize them but ironically the hasmoneans and the sadducees often because they're the rich elite they often hellenize more than anybody once you become a king in the uh the greek speaking east in the hellenistic world the only way to be a king in the hellenistic world is to be like a hellenistic king and so the hasmoneans adopt names like alexander

(1:32:46) and so forth they make greek macedonian names and they um and they adopt that kind of culture and so there is a lot of greek around so how much you know jesus encountered you know it's you it's it depends on how we um you build up your understanding of the historical jesus and the context though it's it's right there it's not like um it's not like what people would want to do where they say oh well jesus must have gone he had we don't know what he did when he was a kid so he probably went to india and studied buddhism so

(1:33:14) that didn't happen it's not the buddhism isn't there but there's definitely you know greeks are everywhere right around it or greek a people influenced by greek culture okay han thomas can you scroll this a little bit too what han thomas writes what do you think of the more recent reconstructions of what jesus would have looked like for example in one article jesus according to a.

(1:33:47) i by boss uderwick inspirational people tend to look more charismatic than the image you showed us i feel that that reconstruction is used by people who are against christianity or religion and using it in a mocking way look what your messiah looked like for real well yeah um and and by the way that i don't think that much of that reconstruction i only use that to to say that we should understand that jesus would have had a semitic background in other words he would have looked like a middle eastern jewish or palestinian or syrian person the same way and you know anyway as opposed to uh chinese or

(1:34:23) swedish right even though uh he's sometimes painted those other ways um in terms of i haven't seen that this jesus according to ai i look forward to looking at that um i guess one of the things i think yeah i appreciate that this idea that charismatic people tend to look charismatic uh on the other hand you know peasants also look like can look like peasants and and charismatic people can be very charismatic and you know without being um beautiful or models or someone um one of the things that we have in the restoration tradition is

(1:34:57) uh you know like so going back to joseph smith so so once joseph smith um joseph a very charismatic guy i think nobody can deny that uh in in what he was doing but once he was dead you know the portraits of him that kept on getting we don't have any photographs and so the portraits get more and more handsome and model like you know and so my um family member of mine who knew him as a boy and who lived into the uh you know anyway decades later and got to see the later portraits he says he made a comment like um these these portraits we see of joseph smith would very much very much

(1:35:33) flatter him you know because because the real guy had a kind of a weird look to him he had kind of a more of a sloping brow and and this and that you know things like things that don't don't get made into the portrait he's a little and the portraits that from his life that we have he's more penguin looking and so on so i think it's very possible for a charismatic guy to not be a supermodel but on the other hand it's also possible for people like beauty and so and it's also possible for you know like you say leaders to be it's more

(1:36:02) likely he's tall leaders are tall right just by by percentages usually because people are coded to um so to your point people are coded to uh uh want good you know follow good looking people around and also tall people and strong people and so forth and so who knows and probably because he's a leader he uh and maybe that that particular image isn't as good and we can't have a real picture of jesus is what i mean to say okay bob garrison are there places where um are the places where jesus was supposedly born crucified and buried really agreed upon by any historians as

(1:36:39) the actual spots no um they are not so um so in terms of the places that we have uh where jesus was born crucified buried and and every other thing you know uh there's you know every place on the you know of in the entire um easter story there's a site you know the garden of gethsemane and the and where the trial is and the whole road where he's carrying the cross in other words that's all figured out in a traditional and a religious sense and some of those traditions go all the way back to the 4th century um when const emperor

(1:37:22) constantine converts his mother who is a christian uh uh helena helen uh she goes to um palestine and um and locals show her around and find all these artifacts which she pays incredible amounts of money for and she identifies all these spots and they build churches there and so forth and so it goes back to then but there's not particular reason why you know after you know it had been 300 years why many of these traditions are are correct and so they're traditional spots but they're not uh historical spots um

(1:38:02) bob asked was jesus probably illiterate so it's it can't we can't say i think probably i mean he's coming out of a class that's illiterate he doesn't write those are um those are strong arguments in that favor um but he you can make the case the case can also be made that that he is literate so that there there are there are literate people in uh who in contemporary judaism for himself so second temple judaism because they are very interested in um studying uh the tanakh the whole hebrew bible and so um so if so you know i mean so there's the case can be made either way

(1:38:45) amy lynn calloway says jesus was traveling well wasn't he uh again we cannot say for that um so what's almost certain is that he would had to speak aramaic as the language he would have grown up that's the common tongue that everybody was speaking it's possible that he also knows hebrew because he quotes the bible and reads this bible in in the gospel stories but those are written late so we don't know for sure uh and in terms of greek if he knew to be trilingual here if he um you know i don't know you know maybe so i mean i don't know if he's trilingual but anyway it's completely possible he's

(1:39:27) living next to all of these greek speaking people so i there's no there's no i don't know what to say certainly bilingual is certainly quite possible aramaic for sure so thumper says what's the significance of aramaic was there an aramaic culture as well as a language so aramaic really just means syrian so aram is the area um around damascus so what we think of now is as syria and so the area between mesopotamia and egypt we you know we we now think of syria because of modern syria is just the little country is just the little country of syria in some sense though syria is all of the land between um

(1:40:15) you know us syria and egypt and so the the people in this area and actually even by this time the mesopotamians speak this aramaic language the syrian language and so the um the significance of it is that uh the empires um had had picked it up it had been a commercial language and it got picked up by the um the assyrians the babylonians and the persians and made into kind of an official language of the persian empire and so people used that for government business and trade and so forth and a certain point local semitic languages like hebrew died

(1:40:54) out except as a liturgical language and so they still have hebrew in order to read scripture the same way that you know people in italy still have latin because of the church right and uh people in um i don't know people still use old church slavonic but there's all kinds of different cases where liturgical language continues uh religious language continues uh sumerian is like maintains itself way long past you know the end of the sumer anybody speaking sumerian and so forth so um so this is the common

(1:41:28) language is what you know you'd say and so that's uh in terms of the culture yeah it's the the people also have um you know a similar culture and customs and so on so we sometimes call that um syrian or syria phoenician since the phoenicians the canaanites the israelites they're all in the same the syrians they're all the same kind of cultural cultural zone um so fastball flake says is there a scholarly consensus on cue to what extent do scholars accept this hypothetical source so so it's a hypothetical source and so it can't uh you know therefore it always

(1:42:12) has to be maintained that unless uh unless a document was ever found that is uh you know that preserves q which seems you know i mean it's always possible uh that you can dig up scrolls like we've seen in in egypt with the nagamati scrolls or in qumran but it's getting less and less um uh less and less possible i would say that um the queue remains the um the most accepted uh kind of consensus that scholars have on on the the answer to the the synoptic problem so you have to explain the synoptic problem somehow and so i'd say that the q hypothesis the

(1:42:57) two source hypothesis that includes therefore q um is the the most uh accepted one you know it's like if you were reading the like the new oxford annotated bible you go to the notes it just presumes usually q um you know so it's a as a fairly standard kind of you know baseline um but you always have to remember you just have to be cautious so that whenever there's um you know whenever you're dealing with a hypothesis you have to be sure it's a hypothesis that's why i've been a little wishy-washy with whether we can can we say that jesus is trilingual or not and so forth it's because um it depends on

(1:43:35) how you argue it right so we can say he spoke aramaic for sure and then after that there's a good case you can make for hebrew and greek is in the in the in the neighborhood anyway um so there's a question is it possible that jesus and john the baptist were essenes and so i did talk about that in the lecture and so um i said yeah it's possible people have made the case a lot of people have argued that there's a lot of overlap especially between john the baptist and the essenes and people have argued that

(1:44:05) jesus may have been an essene i am not convinced by those i mean i think if anything certainly not for me i don't think it's i'm not convinced that there's much to say that jesus is an essene um i think it's i mean people made the possible argument that maybe john the baptist was raised in essene and he's kind of a reformer who took it his own way and made a new thing uh i i'm perfectly happy with that it's again it's somewhat speculative what i'd say is that you know those are these are ideas that are and and peoples and thought schools that are in the um immediate context that inform

(1:44:43) um the context of the john the baptist movement and jesus movements uh those are realized oh okay oh uh rowan wagner has talked about my questions um which i don't have on screen anymore so the first one was can you think of other examples of how jesus responded to his second uh temple judaism context and he says in in rome says working or doing something on the sabbath and so there's several occasions when jesus does things like healing on the sabbath so he is um this is something that is taken right out of

(1:45:21) the second temple context as people are doing that kind of jewish law observances the second question was what are some of the portraits or depictions of jesus that stick out in your experience and he says i don't like statues or depictions of jesus on the cross and so i would say ron that's probably a yeah i would say that that that that showing a a protestant lens probably i mean i'd appreciate that but in other words you we've grown out of a tradition that comes out of protestantism and uh and protestants have especially

(1:45:59) you know the same way initially protestants in la crosse's at all they later said crosses are okay but not crucifixes with jesus on the cross um and depicting the kind of suffering of jesus and things like that became a particularly catholic thing to do in the counter reformation and so kind of just embracing the kind of bodily stuff of it whereas the um was the protestants went kind of all mental spiritual and wanted to get rid of you know the you know the physical kind of stuff like that and so you know i mean i i appreciate it because i have that same background kind

(1:46:35) of bias myself and so i'm not a huge i'm not personally a huge fan of those either but i mean we kind of also have to just be aware of where we're probably getting that a little as we as we have to step back and think about it in ourselves and then the third question is what can or should christians do to overcome some of these historical legacies of just totally mistreating jewish cousins and rhone suggests that we learn from our dis differences and embrace what we have in common and he says this would also apply to muslims as well to the third of the abrahamic religions and i

(1:47:13) agree absolutely there is a comment that some people want me to give a lecture on the prosperity gospel and that's a good thing to talk about and we talk about the prosperity gospel and our opposition to the prosperity gospel uh in sermons even so okay mark b says i'd like to learn about and understand center place so center place here where i'm at in toronto is the this is the sanctuary this is the church of church building for uh the community of christ toronto congregation um the toronto congregation is a

(1:47:59) you know a venerable congregation within uh the restoration latter-day saint tradition getting all the way initially organized back um in the 1830s when um you know joseph smith and other uh restoration leaders kind of came here and the congregation here was first organized under a guy named john taylor who later ended up being the president of the church in utah after brigham young died anyway in terms of center place uh there continued to be members who stayed here in toronto um uh that those members united with what was called the reorganization

(1:48:44) um which now is known as community of christ which are the people in the restoration tradition who uh opposed polygamy and opposed a bunch of uh the other um theological innovations of of late mormonism temple practices and so forth and who came together under uh joseph smith's son his wife emma and his son joseph smith iii to have kind of a a reform or more pragmatic version of the restoration tradition we've continued to evolve since then um uh contin our part of our um we don't have a creed part of our uh kind of unofficial motto

(1:49:24) is truth wherever it's found so as we are constantly one of our one of our missions initiatives is to uh develop disciples to serve to uh continually learn and grow together and so um the lectures we think accomplish that by uh studying uh everything from our kind of extended heritage you know that goes all the way back throughout the the western tradition and as well as um um even comparative religion and so forth um so that we can better inform our understanding as we constantly um uh seek to improve and develop and so

(1:50:04) um so those are i mean there's a lot more you can see on our our webpage centerplast.ca we have five mission initiatives nine enduring principles we are a progressive christian tradition church in the uh restoration tradition uh which is to say the lat and the component of it the latter-day saint movement and specifically community of christ which is um anyway the progressive most progressive um denomination within that movement all right well that's a great note to end on thank you so much for all of these comments uh this is getting better and

(1:50:43) better all of this dialogue we um have done a lot of that i hope you enjoyed this lecture uh remember i think it's yeah this next week is i'm sorry thursday we're talking about machiavelli and then next week join us for the flood you