NT History - The Life of Christ

Okay, this one is on New Testament history, the life of Christ. The truth is, you know, as we're covering these things, we could spend our whole six months on any one of these topics. So, we're hitting the high spots. But the life of Christ, I thought, well, what do you cover? One of the things I wanted to do is to cover the things you usually don't hear. Okay? So this is, for the most part, going to be things you don't hear about. Okay?

So hopefully that'll be interesting and helpful to you. We're, of course, in this last period of time here, this little tiny stretch. Right here, the end of that time between the Testaments, we're now picking up that beginning of the New Testament era, but only into the first few decades, because the life of Christ only covers a little more than a few decades, right? And you have, by the way, on your chart, I don't know if you have the life of Christ labeled, but you may want to add that to it. But go from the birth, which by the way, look at the year zero. Year zero is, by the way, it never existed. It's just a marker. Nobody lived in the year zero Okay, they went from 1 BC to 180.

Okay, just so you know, okay, and so So now Here we have the the birth which took place and as we'll cover prior to March of 4 BC the temple visit 12 years later and the beginning of Christ's ministry which And this bases on the crucifixion of Christ around A.D. 30. By some logic of pieces of history, A.D. 30 or 33 are the most logical times, and we won't go into the details on that, but at any rate, this is based on that.

The Book of Acts, which we'll get into next week, follows that for another 30 years, roughly 30 years. So if that kind of helps you remember 30 years for the life of Christ, a little bit more, and the book of Acts, 30 years, a little bit more for that. Okay, so you might want to note that life of Christ in the book of Acts in your handout there, if you want to clarify that. You have in your appendix, that's what the A stands for, you have in your appendix, this New Testament chronology chart, and it's this section up here in the upper left that we'll be looking at here. It's the life of Christ. Okay, so let's start with Joseph and Mary. Joseph and Mary are what we, the English term we have is betrothed.

It was different from our culture. When you got engaged, it was legal. And to get that engagement broken off required the same thing to go through a divorce. You had to have a divorce, a legal divorce to break off an engagement. It was unlike in our culture where engagement is informal, and it may mean a lot to people personally, but legally it has no weight. In that culture, when you're engaged, you're into it and you've made a contract and you're going to have to go through a process.

So, here they are up in Nazareth, which is in that little circled area, and up in Nazareth, Just a small town. Matter of fact, the Roman records, the Roman account of when they walked through Nazareth to go down and attack Jerusalem and, you know, decades later, their notation in their military records is that Nazareth is just a garbage town.

Podunk. Okay? Now, so here's this Roman census. The Roman census is required, and the Roman census tells them that they'll need They'll need to go down to the place of their ancestors. Now, the Romans were really nasty about this. They had these census, you know, events at different periods of time. And they didn't care, you know, you're pregnant, sick, we don't care. You got to be there. You know, if you're not there, you're in trouble. And why? Because we want to tax you.

So, no. So that would take them both to Bethlehem. They both had ancestry back to David, right? So they'd go to Bethlehem. If they followed the Jewish tradition, they would go around Samaria. Now, we don't know, we aren't certain that they went around Samaria. I'm saying if they followed the tradition, they would. We don't know exactly what the route would be. The informal routes that are less well known would take them a slightly shortcut route, but along less traveled roads.

This is a Roman census declaration. We find all kinds of them in the papyrus. So I mean, this is not something that's disputed The Romans had census declarations and you'd say, I so and so and so and so have this to declare, you know, and you'd have to fill out, you know, basically the information requested and census officials would have these big stacks and on that they would base your taxes. Of course, if you didn't declare things, that got you in trouble. Anyway, we have lots of these. There's no question about the Roman census.

Okay, now, the main travel routes, you go from Nazareth down to Jerusalem at the bottom there. They had some main travel routes and a couple of them would take them off to the west but would still take them through Samaritan country, just not the main part. They could have gone there. More Jewish impurity would be even if you had to go off out into the desert and come back.

So the idea is get around Samaria would be the traditional thing. So here's Joseph and Mary likely taking an extra little bit of miles, even with Mary ready to deliver, if they were traditional. Most likely Mary did not ride a donkey, contrary to all the Christmas cards and things of that sort. We don't know that she didn't, but one, there's no mention of a donkey, and two, donkeys were expensive. They didn't have any used donkey lots in Nazareth, is my guess. So that's just one of those, what's more likely? More likely they didn't. and that Joseph and Mary walked. We haven't identified an inn in Bethlehem, which is not surprising, because an inn, from what we can tell, would have been just a big house with no interior walls, and not necessarily much in the way of closed doors and windows and things.

It was just a place for shelter, and it would have a dirt floor. You'd have groups of people. They would just start a fire at different places, just whoever wanted to gather something around. get a little fire going and people gather around if it was cold.

And certainly, here's the innkeeper. It's a census. Everybody who is related to David is coming back to Bethlehem. This is a family reunion forced by the Roman government. And the place is busy. So the innkeeper, contrary to probably hundreds if not thousands of sermons, was not hard-hearted. that he didn't have room. The place was packed. It was a census. It was a forced family reunion. Everybody who in the last thousand years was descended from David had to come back to Bethlehem, room or not. Everybody, you know, had already packed the place out. And it, by the way, was not a silent night. It was holy, but not silent.

And so now in the midst of that kind of environment, here comes Joseph with a pregnant wife. By the way, if you had that kind of an inn, here's a one-room place, a bunch of people with fires around, you know, relatives and whatnot, distant ones and close ones, and a bunch of camels tied up outside. Do you want to have a baby there? Probably not. So, you know, having someplace off to the side, even if it's a stable, is probably better than having a baby with a crowd. At any rate.

There are caves in the area, and so those would have worked well as an overnight shelter. Some of the caves have little troughs, mangers carved in them. The manger, by the way, was probably not wood, contrary to our little drawings and crèches and everything. Wood would have been real expensive, wouldn't have lasted long enough, and the animals chew it up. I can tell you by experience, we had redwood troughs and the animals chewed them up. Most likely made out of limestone, which the limestone in that area is soft when first carved into and then hardens with exposure to the air. So, more likely limestone, and it might have been a manger used for centuries.

This is Bethlehem 1894. I've made mention before, I like old pictures because they aren't gunked up with a bunch of stuff, so that's why I showed this. 1894, the modern picture of Bethlehem is a whole lot more crowded and more unlike what the original would have been. There are some shepherds actually near Bethlehem now, a modern picture here.

So, interesting, it's still going on. The interesting thing too, because this area is an area where they would have been around the temple, these shepherds who were approached by the angels may have been the ones who were involved in raising the temple sheep for sacrifices. How about that? You've been raising for generations. the temple sacrifices come meet God's lamb. Wow.

Okay, by the way, the shepherds were of low esteem in the culture. Most people just loathed shepherds. And imagine having, here you are in the inn in Bethlehem, the place is already crowded, got all kinds of people, camels outside, donkeys tied up. And these shepherds come around, these guys are stinking and unkempt and you know, Whoo, shepherds, get them out of here, you know? And so these shepherds come around asking. Their response was probably not, you know, an answer to their question, but leave, okay? Nonetheless, they were able to find out where it was.

Here's Herod and the Wise Men. Herod the Great and Matthew 2 fits with none of his records outside. Herod decided, as he was getting closer to the end of his life, he, by the way, had arteriosclerosis, okay? So he's getting close to the end of his life, so he decided, no, I don't want this son to be my heir. And so in 7 BC, he had one of them killed. And then he died in March of 4 BC. Just before that, he had another one killed. So that's why Augustus Caesar says it is better to be Herod's pig, hus, than his son, huyas. So he made a play on words as well as making an apt statement for the guy.

All right. Oh, by the way, we're in Olympic season, right? Herod hosted the Olympics in 12 BC. Interesting. Not that anybody loved him for it, but just thought you'd like to know that. Okay. The Magi came from Parthia. Why would that get Herod's attention? Remember the Parthian Empire? Why was Herod put into power? Keep the Parthians out. Anybody comes over from that area, what are you going to do? You're going to be very suspicious.

We know from Acts 2 that some of the people who became believers that day were from Parthia as well. So there was constantly people coming from Parthia. That by itself would be alarming. But to have some people from Parthia that weren't Jewish, that would get his attention.

So just that alone would get his attention. Asking about the King of the Jews. Numbers 24, 17 talks about the star in a manner that prophesies of the Messiah. That may have gotten their attention. And by the way, over in Parthia, where the Magi came from, there's a lot of what? Jews. And the Jews would have talked about their scriptures, and the scriptures would have talked about this prophecy.

So a real interesting connection, huh? Lots of history that converges on this point. Here is Jesus now in the temple, age 12. Dr. Luke in Luke chapter 2 records this pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And Joseph and Mary and Jesus in the temple. Everything about the account would be according to what we know about the culture and what the Jews did in the temple and everything else except Jesus being able to answer them in such detail at age 12.

Now, what typically happens around that age for Jewish boys, even now? The bar mitzvah, right? And what is that? That's their kind of graduation into adulthood, is the way they mark it. And a bar mitzvah that you would have some questions, checking out this young Jewish fellow to see if, you know, he qualifies. Well, what this amounted to is asking some questions, and he comes back with these incredible responses. We don't know exactly if this is Bar Mitzvah, but I'm just saying it's interesting that the time seems to fit.

Jesus was the son of a carpenter, and between Matthew 13.55 and Mark 6.3, we see that both Joseph was a carpenter and Jesus was a carpenter.

So it fits the tradition. It may have been done either in the one-room house, and Nazareth being a small town, and a carpenter from Nazareth probably being relatively poor. Here you have this one-room house, the whole family lives in it, and you also have the carpenter's shop either in the house or possibly in an attachment off to the side. That was the most likely arrangement. So the commute wasn't long anyway, okay, to go to work. But you imagine that arrangement. That's quite a deal.

We'll go in later as to how the typical household went and how they ate and things like that. Some of the things about how they lived would shock us. It was normal to have people standing at the door and looking through the windows watching you eat. It was normal to have people walking by and sampling what you're eating. Anyway, but we'll talk more about that later.

But real different from our culture, okay? Jesus entered ministry it says in Luke 3 23 about 30 years of age He focused most of his time in the area around Galilee and Jerusalem and substantially towards the Jews the only Contact that we have recorded would have been in say it in his infancy Probably going to Alexandria as a child of the scapegoats Wickedness and then contact, of course, with the Syrophoenician women, contact occasionally with some Romans, and then finally at the end, of course, with Roman soldiers. But largely, you see them intentionally focusing ministry upon the Jews.

Here's Jordan River entering the Sea of Galilee. By the way, there's one you never hear of. Lake Semaconitis is the little lake north of Galilee. And then the Jordan River comes down. then Sea of Galilee and then Jordan River comes down and into the Dead Sea where it ends. All right. Selection of Jesus' disciples. They were all Jewish men who were substantially from Galilee.

Acts 2.7 makes the point that here are these guys on the day of Pentecost and the comment is, aren't these guys from Galilee? How come they're all talking the language that we speak? These men, however, were diverse in some other ways. We don't get the details, but I almost get some almost humorous wonderings. Let me tell you what I mean.

Matthew was a tax collector. For whom? Who would he collect taxes for? For Rome, okay. Now, here on the other side of the coin was Simon the Zealot. What's his orientation? Fight him. Collect taxes for him, fight him. Now, you put those two together. Let's say you pair them up. I don't know if that happened, but let's You pair them up and you say, you two are going off there to evangelize and spread the news about the kingdom. Oh boy, can you imagine that would be a fiery combination. There were some really good talks around the fire from time to time. Alright, here's James and John who are brothers and one of the things we know is that there was a request. By whom? About those brothers. What's that?

Mother, yeah, come up to Jesus. Hey, you know, when you come in your kingdom, you know, can you put these two guys on one side or the other of you? I'd sure like that, you know, a little bit of family pull there. Jewish mom got to put some help in there. And we'll give you extra doses of food there if you go for that.

Okay, and then here's Judas Iscariot. What an interesting crop of guys. Now, those are kind of extremes and interesting combinations. There are others, of course. Now, Jesus focused ministry upon Israel. We know that from a couple passages we pointed out recently in Matthew. But those were the lost sheep. And by the way, that lost sheep phrase comes right out of the Old Testament. This isn't something that Jesus cooked up. When he says the lost sheep of Israel, everybody goes, ding! I know what you mean. Because the passages were right there, people had looked at them, and anybody who'd been reading the Old Testament knew exactly what he was talking about.

Now, the phrase, tax collectors and sinners, that was New Testamentese for what we would probably say, the scum of the earth. That would be our phrase. The scum of the earth. Their phrase was tax collectors and sinners. So make sure you pick one of those tax collectors to be one of your disciples. Look how often that phrase pops up. And you'll also see other, sometimes shorthand, They'll just say sinners or just tax collectors, and it's just shorthand for the same thing.

It's just different ways of saying the scum of the earth. That was just the most disgusting people you could imagine. And here Jesus was hanging around with the scum of the earth. Now, Christ was often at odds with the political groups in Israel. We mentioned the scribes and the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Herodians were also against him. At certain points, even zealots, there were different ones who had opposition to Jesus.

So these are some examples that you see there. EG, by the way, just means example. Okay. He encountered these groups most often. In a few cases, he went and set things straight at the temple, like dumping over the money changers and all that. Most of the time where he encountered trouble was where they pursued him for the confrontation. He typically did not pursue the confrontation, but they pursued him. Usually to try to ask him a question, to needle him, to get him to say something that they thought would trip him up. So it's interesting. When you see his contact with these people, he's not going out trying to say, hey, I think today I'll go out and see if I can needle the Pharisees or something. It was typically when they came to him wanting to stir up trouble. Okay? We doing okay so far? All right, baffled? Okay, all right. Now, culture or counterculture is the question.

If we understand the history and culture behind the gospel, it'll allow us to see innumerable rich insights into the Word of God. There's, in fact, drama there that's real, that's intended to be there, that frequently escapes us if we don't understand the background.

Even thinking about Jesus sending out the Twelve and thinking about putting, okay, here's, you know, Matthew and You know, Simon the Zealot together. Imagine Peter and Judas. I don't know who Judas was matched up with. Can you imagine that? You imagine later on thinking, man, I walked around and told people about the kingdom with this guy. And he betrayed the Lord. I mean, that must have really hit people between the eyes when they were thinking about that. We sat down and ate with these guys. Just phenomenal. All right.

This perspective will allow us to understand what was said and done far more clearly. There will be things that are in line with the culture, things we'll look at and say, yeah, that's exactly the way the culture was, and other things that are in such shocking, stark contrast that it jumps off the page. There were times, as I'm reading it and you come to understand the culture, There are times when I'm reading through the Old and New Testament, and you look at it, and you think, people reading it must have said, wait, stop, put that down, I've got to soak this in for a minute. Because some of the things that were said were so shockingly in contrast to the culture. Okay.

Even though we will find that Christ and the inspired authors of Scripture will at various points call believers out of the human culture into a life based on Christ's personal history, okay, so that's the one thing, Scriptures will call us out of the culture, but scriptures will communicate the message using history and culture to date because that's the connecting point that the people would understand. See that? So we're going to understand history and culture even to understand ultimately that as believers we're called out of the culture. Make sense? Okay. I'm going to give a few examples here of some cultural analogies and contrasts. One of them is out of the Sermon on the Mount, the speck and the beam. Before you look at the speck in your brother's eye, deal with the beam in your own.

And Jesus was a carpenter, right? And other people would see carpenters working, and so they would know, of course, what a carpenter is. But Jesus would be intimately familiar with it. And of course, everybody lived in houses And the structure of the ceilings was such, usually they were open-beam ceilings. It would have been very difficult and expensive to have anything otherwise. So open-beam ceilings, people would see the carpenters work in the ceiling.

Now, how easy is it to get a speck in your eye? Real easy, right? You're walking, even just walking along the road somewhere, especially in those days, on paved roads, you've got a bunch of dust and crud and everything. Donkey droppings, whatever it is. And all that gets stirred up in a little bit of wind and you've got something in your eye. That can happen accidentally.

Does anybody, if you found a beam and even if it was worked by hand, would you assume that it just showed up? No. The beam got there because somebody worked on it. So what does Jesus do? The speck in your brother's eye got there by accident. But this thing you've got on your own that's a big structural beam, that took some work. Okay Interesting stuff.

So here's Jesus using this illustration that he himself would be ultimately very familiar with But the people would also be familiar with because they would see these beams in their ceiling all the time That's the word that he used a foundation, you know a structural beam That kind of a beam would would be in their eye. Okay, I Have this when I was building a house about two decades back. I used hand-hewn beams and the ceilings.

I've used that example By the way, carpenters in those days couldn't go to the lumber yard, so a carpenter was also a logger. If you ordered something out of wood, the carpenter would go up and select the tree or trees and do all the cutting down the tree and stripping off the branches and cleaning up the tree and the whole bit. So a carpenter was also a logger because they just didn't have lumber yards. That was not the norm.

Beams were mostly shaped by hand visible in the ceiling, of course we mentioned that. There's millstones. Jesus makes mention of both small and large millstones. And two women, for example, working in a hand mill was so common and essential to life, and it was a long-standing Jewish practice.

This Deuteronomy 24.6, it forbid, if you loan somebody money, you are not permitted by the law to take their millstone even the top stone of the two in collateral. You could not do that.

Why? What would be the reason? Yeah, you're talking about, you know, here's how I prepare my bread. So something very basic. So the law forbid you as a lender from taking even the top stone. So these millstones are real common. And here's the law almost 15 centuries earlier than what Jesus talking about. So very long standing, well integrated into the culture. So Jesus uses this example in Matthew 24, where he's talking about, you know, this actually time of judgment, there'll be two women grinding and one taken away. This would be a common practice.

Why would you think that they have two women grinding? Why would that be so common? First of all, why women? The women did the work in the house. Where were the men? The hewing beams are out working in the fields. Yeah, in other words, they have something else to do. So this would be something that a woman would do. It would have to do with their domestic preparations. So that's one. Okay. Why would there be two? Why do you see two in the picture? Okay.

One's dropping the grain in. The other's doing this. Which one is tiring? Rotating stones, tiring. So having two, what do you get to do? You get to switch. And so one woman doing it was like, okay, drop some in, do this, drop some in, real inefficient. And then plus you just got real tired. Two women, it was much more efficient and you could trade off. And so two women grinding at the mill was just like standard fare. If you didn't have family members that could join with doing that, then you'd get neighbors or something. Two women at the mill was just like, that's the way to do it.

No question. Okay? Now, so Jesus used a very common illustration when he said that, everybody absolutely would understand what he's saying. No question. Plus, they couldn't take it in collateral. Everybody had one, even if you were in financial trouble. You still had the two women at the mill. Okay, large millstones were common too.

Two kinds. One is the kind that's sort of a cylinder where they drop sort of a funnel type thing in the top, and then it would grind against a stone, you know, that it was kind of perched on top of, and then the ground material would drop off to the side, and then you'd collect it in a trough in the bottom. So it would be one design. The other would be not so much for grinding, although they'd eventually do that, but more for kind of flattening. Ever seen like rolled oats or something of that sort? put it down there, and so you'd have usually a donkey or maybe a couple of guys pushing this wheel around. So you'd have both of those designs. So Jesus said, you know, he says, you know, woe unto this man. It would be better if he had a large millstone hung around his neck and thrown into the sea. So he's referring to this one, not the little hand grinder type that the women were using.

There's fish and then there's fish. We think of fish, and of course we've just got a certain idea. They had fish, and I'm glad you're all sitting down, and I hope your breakfast has settled well. Hang on a sec here. The fish were a common theme in the Gospels, of course. Jesus used fish in various kinds of parables and sort of quick proverbs and things of that sort. And so we know that several of the disciples were fishermen. James and John, we mentioned, are brothers. And Zebedee, their father, seemed to have a substantial fishing operation.

Enough so that John, by the way, seems to be very well connected, providing in the Gospel of John information about the Sanhedrin that the other Gospels don't provide. Only he records the discussion of Nicodemus, for example, with Jesus. Only he records Nicodemus defending Jesus in front of the Sanhedrin and being put down. So he's got connections. And finally, at Christ's crucifixion, John gets Peter into Caiaphas' house. So anyway, here's John who's a fisherman, could be low-level or like John, apparently having some connections, political connections.

The means of eating and keeping the fish is often not well understood in our day. It was by far the exception that you would catch a fish with a hook, more substantially and most commonly with the nets. Least commonly eaten were fresh fish, typically called ichthys, and there are seasonal references there where ichthys is used, where they'd catch fresh fish and that's what you'd eat. Why would there be a problem with fresh fish? Can you think of why there would be difficulty with that? What's that?

No refrigeration. There's no way to put it on ice. If you don't happen to be right next to ice and it didn't too often happen, no way to keep it cold. Next most common was they'd have dried fish. And I represent up here one way. There's actually another way that was less common here.

What they would do is they'd lay down a layer of fish, and then they'd sprinkle some rock salt. And they'd put down another layer of fish and put down some rock salt. And so you'd have this dried salty fish. That is most likely what was used when Jesus fed the 5,000. And they'd break the fish in pieces. So you'd have these little pieces of dried salty fish. I don't see anybody saying yum yum, but okay, that's what they did. They didn't have sardine cans, okay? So that was also common. That's apsarion, sometimes also called ecthus as well. So there's a little bit of interchangeability. Now this is the one you've got to be sitting down for.

Fermented fish paste. Real common throughout the Roman Empire, not just in Israel, but throughout the Roman Empire, was fermented fish paste. It is still popular in much of the Orient. They would grind up the fish, they would ferment it, the oilier stuff would rise to the top and they loved to put that on their bread. But they'd take this fermented fish paste with the oil and they'd spread that on bread and eat it that way.

The Romans even, we have records of their military purchases for the Roman soldiers and they even had military specification fermented fish paste, and they'd check it for quality, and if somebody came up and tried to sell something that was substandard, they'd reject it. No, we don't want that. Or we'd give that just to the troops and the officers to get the good stuff. But fermented fish paste was actually one of the more common and a significant protein source for people in that era.

Jesus only in fact the whole New Testament only uses that word once and it's where Jesus is resurrected He's on the shores. Remember the disciples went out fishing and Interestingly, I mean he speaks with a lot of euphemism. He says little boys. That's the word he uses little boys Got any fish yet? Caught any fermented fish paste yet? Isn't that interesting? Yeah, that's the word that he uses there Okay Now, the Gospels themselves.

Matthew wrote from a perspective that addressed the Jewish scriptures. If you want to make note of it, he pictured Jesus as king. That's Matthew's focus. He addressed Jewish issues, Jewish questions. The things that the Jews would have been saying, what about this? He answers those kinds of questions. Very important to keep in mind. He is answering explicitly the questions the Jews are going to ask. You want a question about Jesus' birth? Does that matter to the Jews? What's his genealogy? He's going to answer that. He's going to answer things from a Jewish perspective.

Mark wrote to the Roman mind, and he wrote about Jesus as a servant. And so the Romans were interested. They said, get to the bottom line. I want to get something done. So you see Mark is a brief gospel compared to the others. And what you find frequently is the word immediately. Immediately. Boom. Boom. Boom. And he keeps using that.

Why? The Romans didn't want a bunch of messing around, philosophizing. They want to get the job done. That's their mindset. So that's how Mark pictures it. He's not interested in answering Jewish questions. Not that he doesn't address that in some degree. But his focus is, I want to write to the Roman mind. Those Romans want to get things done. They're not going to philosophize. They're not going to mess around. They just want it to happen. So that's how Mark describes it. Luke, on the other hand, Luke is a doctor.

He writes with a Greek mind. He writes of Christ as a man, in Christ's humanity, and often with a lot of medical terminology. Even the words that he uses about everything from Jesus' birth all the way up through incidents in the life of Christ, he uses medical terms. He also uses other technical terms, and frequently even very specific political terms and military terms. He's a very precise writer.

John wrote to the broadest audience, appealing to everyone, and he himself says very explicitly, these things are written that you might believe, and that believing you might have life through his name, almost 50 times. In the Gospel of John, life. Life. Because his focus is, he wants people to believe and that they may have life through his name. And so he's not zeroing in on one group. His focus is not so much on a group, but on the message. Believe, so that you may have life. Okay.

Christ's earthly ministry, there's lots of, and we go through maps and all sorts of, he was here, he was there. I'm not going to do that, because I figure you can look at the maps. Obviously, he's focusing a lot around Jerusalem and around the temple. By the way, if people lived in Jerusalem in those days, it was expected that you would make every possible accommodation to people who were coming into Jerusalem for the feasts. That was just an unwritten, you're going to do that. Okay? If you lived around Jerusalem, you're just going to have, you know, several times a year, people coming in and staying with you. Just count on it. That's the way it's going to be.

And so people had rooms and, and, you know, facilities to accommodate guests because you were going to have lots of them regularly. And, uh, so at any rate, Jesus would stay often at Bethany, uh, Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Uh, and we'll talk, we'll show that a little bit here. Um, but then, uh, aside from that, you've also got Galilee and he'd spend time around Galilee. Most. of what you'll find is those areas. Some, of course, elsewhere, but those are going to be the areas of focus.

Here's, for example, a picture of the Sea of Galilee. How many of you have been to Lake Tahoe? You've been to Lake Tahoe? A couple of Lake Tahoe? When I lived in Carson City, it was nice to have that as an easy rule of thumb. Sea of Galilee is about two-thirds the size of Lake Tahoe, if you've been to Lake Tahoe. Lake Tahoe is about sea 11 across, 22 north and south. So the Sea of Galilee is a little smaller than that.

All right. We're going to step through the last week. I have triumphal entry in quotes. It's because I think that's a real misnomer. That's not what it says in the text. And in fact, we'll see here in just a little minute, it was not. I mean, Jesus comes over the hill, looks at Jerusalem, and what does he do? Break out in cheers? Smile a lot? No. It breaks out in great sobs. But we'll see here in a minute. There's another reason why it's not... It's a misnomer, I think, to call it a triumphal entry. But, oh, excuse me. It was five days before the crowd yelled, crucify him, too. So, how triumphal is that? Monday, cleansing the temple. Cursing of the fig tree. The reason for the cursing of the fig tree. Fig tree in the Old Testament? It was the picture of Israel. This is picturing, in a means that Jews would understand, Israel's having ultimately rejected their Messiah.

Another reason being the day after the so-called triumphal entry. I think it's a misnomer. He's saying, look at the countdowns here, folks. You've rejected the Messiah. Time's short. We get on to Tuesday, the fig tree withered in the temple. There were temple controversies, people asking him questions. Of course, they're trying to needle him because they're saying, hey, we've got to really squeeze him here. He's in Jerusalem. We've got a chance. We're going to really put the screws on him.

The Mount of Olives discourse, that is, here's the Mount of Olives, which, of course, has today a lot more stuff on it. But he would be there overlooking Jerusalem and then telling them about the end times. about the time when Jerusalem and Israel would be attacked. Then Wednesday was probably a day of quiet. We don't have anything particularly recorded. He may have just stayed out at Bethany, the home of Mary Martha and Lazarus.

Here's a shot on the left side overlooking Jerusalem. This is looking towards the east, towards Bethany. The Mount of Olives is kind of in the top center area there. What you see in the middle to the right is what's now the Dome of the Rock, the Islamic shrine. And then here's a picture of Bethany from the 1930s. And again, I prefer these older photos. This one happens to be colorized, which I wish it wasn't, but that's what I had. So Bethany was just a village that was off to the side.

Again, if you lived in the area of Jerusalem, even if you're not in Jerusalem, if you live in that general area, Come any Jewish festival. You're going to be having company just count on it. Just get you know get ready It's the standard you know of behavior Thursday preparation for an observance of the Passover. This is the traditional side of the Last Supper by the way This is in the portion of Jerusalem called the Essene quarter the Essenes are an unmentioned group in the New Testament and because they largely stayed remote. It was away from the temple. They were disgusted by the way the Sadducees and the Pharisees were running things.

But this is found in there. It has had some restoration in more recent centuries, so this isn't exactly the way it looked. And it appears to be fairly genuine. We don't have anything that specifically excludes it. So this may very well be the place of the last supper.

By the way, this last April, we went over the historical and cultural background and putting together the scriptures on the Last Supper. I think they have it available in the office, but if you'd like to take a look back at that, that's, I think, real helpful.

Friday was the prayer of betrayal and the rest in the Garden of Gethsemane. And then before Pilate, crucifixion and burial. I'm covering obviously some key things very quickly. These stones off to the left there, excuse me, would be the Garden of Gethsemane. Some of those trees, by the way, are old enough that they may well have been there in the garden when Jesus and the apostles were there. These stones to the right are on the floor of the Fortress Antonio.

And one of the things that the Gospels make note of is that the soldiers played games with Jesus, you know, slapping him and putting thorns in his head and spitting on him and stuff like that. You see games scratched in the floor. That's some of those markings that you see on the floor. The soldiers would get bored and so the entertainment, if they weren't harassing some prisoner or something of that sort, was to play games on the floor.

The tomb remained sealed with Pilate's seal guarded by Roman soldiers. The Roman soldiers would have been told, you guard this seal. This is the official seal of Pilate who had the power to authorize a seal under Rome's authority. They were at the expense of their life to guard the tomb.

If it were broken into, each of them was to lose their life. When this happened, it wasn't an external break-in. Nobody violated the soldiers. The stone was rolled away, and they couldn't seem to stop it. I'm sure they were shaken, but they went and told what had happened, and they were given some money to keep quiet.

The resurrection and initial post-resurrection appearances. In these post-resurrection appearances, we have records of various appearances and then Paul's indication of up to 500 at one time seeing Christ resurrected. And we have numerous examples of these stones that are rolled in front. And they oftentimes were what you see, for example, in the one on the right, there's a step up and then another step. Well, that second step there is the stone slot. And then you see the steps going up after you get past the stone slot, but they have these round stones that were rolled in front.

And then the ascension on the Mount of Olives. Again, here's an older photograph without some of the modern stuff that's on it. And then the ascension is given in Acts 1, 6 through 11, where Christ ascends from the Mount of Olives, Zechariah 14, 3, I wonder if that's a typo there. But anyway, in chapter 14 it talks about Christ returning, and it says explicitly to the Mount of Olives, but it says that God will return. God will return. Okay?

Very, very explicit. Very interesting. I bet you can look that up. Now, this you have in your handout set, and I think I printed it full page. I think it's fascinating. If I were to do it myself, and this was done by another fellow, I think he did a great job. The old covenant, I would just say the law, and the new covenant, I would say the church. And that's not on your handout, so if you want to add that, that's fine. The thing that's fascinating to me is look at the correlation of the amount of time and the events between the institution of the law and now this initiation of the time of the church. The parallels are just phenomenal.

The Passover lamb was chosen as the first item as the introduction of the law. Now we have the Jesus entering Jerusalem and going into the temple. That correlates with the choosing of the Passover lamb. About that. Then the next thing we see there, the second item on the top is the Passover feast. And the second item on the bottom is Jesus and the disciples celebrate the Passover feast. And then The third one there is the crossing of the Red Sea and the institution of the law, the resurrection of Christ and the initiation of the Church. From that second event to the fifth event in both is 50 days, and the giving of the law finishes the institution of the law, and the giving of the Holy Spirit finishes the institution that establishes the Church. Very interesting parallels between the two. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing stuff there. Irrefutable proofs of the Lord's presence are both indicated in each of those. Okay. Now, that's it. Questions? Comments? Yes.

What it is, it's different months, but the timing from one event to the next is the same. So the Jews had their different months and those are the names of the Jewish months. So it's shifted in terms of the month, but the timing of the start of each of the events is identical. Pardon? Yeah, same Jewish calendar. The Jews, real interestingly, they have a lunar calendar.

Of course, there's an out-of-sync between the lunar and the solar calendar, right? Yeah, and so you get that out of sync. So what they did to fix it is every once in a while they'd throw in an extra short month, okay? So you had this kind of a lunar crab walk. where you're going along with this lunar calendar and after a while it gets more and more out of sync and then you have to go jump back.

And that's one reason why we'll have December 25th is our Christmas, right? Bang! The Jews have their Hanukkah and you'll notice it bounces all over the place. Why? They're using the Jewish calendar which keeps getting out of phase and then they fix it by throwing in the extra half month. And so that's why Hanukkah keeps bouncing around even though Christmas stays at the same time.

Oh boy. Yeah, anything else? Yes. Oh yeah. Bo Energies. It was interesting. Have you ever run into anybody that's got like a real snappy nickname? You know, some guy, I remember in football we used to give guys nicknames a lot, you know. I won't tell you what my nickname was, but anyway. Yeah, people will sometimes get nicknames, you know, and we'll use it like, what's that actor that's in movies lately called The Rock? They don't even give the guy's name, they just call him The Rock, you know. It was that kind of a thing where you got this nickname and these guys, oh, you see the two of them and they have this characteristic where, oh boy, this son's a thunder, you know. Yeah, these guys must have been, you know, James and John, it's interesting, here's James, what happened to him? killed by the sword, and here's John, who so far as we know is the last one around.

Real interesting contrast there, too. They were, especially a thing, okay, here's the mother, bold enough to come and say, hey, you know, you're going to come in your kingdom? We're talking about, this is a kingdom that's been prophesied for centuries, and all millions of Jews, you know, but when you come here, we want James and John either side of you. I mean, how audacious, you know?

But they were those kinds of guys. where here's John. Peter can't get into Caiaphas' house because he doesn't have Paul. John comes up and he says, hey, it's okay, he's with me, and he gets in. That kind of a guy. Bold, got connections, step into all kinds of situations.

John records things that none of the other gospel writers record about the Sanhedrin. So here he was able to just walk right in, at this top-level thing where these guys have the ability to condemn people to death. They have to go to the Romans for carrying it out, but they have the ability to condemn people to death. Serious stuff. Here's the Sanhedrin, and John just seems to have continuous notation about what's going on, discourses and conversations about what's going on with the Sanhedrin that nobody else does. That's the Sons of Thunder. These guys, we'd say, they rock, they roll. They have impact and they walk into situations and say things and pull strings when other people won't bother. Yeah. You got a question? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, putting the parts and pieces together.

We don't know that they're kings, they're just magi, which the Greek is magoi. and very likely could have been more in the nature of a cross between astronomical technologists and astrologers. The only reason people arrive at three, and even names for them have been assigned, but it's all mythology, is the three gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. So they arrive at three based on that, but we don't know that that's the case. There may have been more. And when they come, what you see is when they're arriving, they're at a house. So some time has passed here. And it's a little different from the actual birth situation. You know, cards and manger crushes we see where the kings are at the manger. It doesn't seem to fit the account.

When you add it all up, though, here's Herod dying at March of 4 BC. We know they had no problem killing people. They'd kill a son in order to have all the babies in Bethlehem killed. But you've got to look at Herod's death, March of 4 BC. You have to have had the magi arrive before that. You had to have had the birth event. sometime prior to that.

So it would mean probably about the end of 5 BC, beginning of 4 BC would be the last time window for that event to have taken place for Christ's birth. And yes, you're right. The Magi, based on the description, probably arrived a little bit later. We don't know how much later. Possibly even Jesus was a toddler by that time. It's hard to force it too late, but we have kind of some absolute stops with Herod's death that puts a limit on it, March of 4 BC. Other questions? Yeah. Basically, they'd go in, you'd have the birth, eight days later would be the circumcision. I don't recall the offering in the temple date exactly, but it would have been pretty shortly thereafter. Bethlehem is only seven miles from Jerusalem, so that wouldn't have been by itself a big issue, because that's a day trip.

It makes sense. In other words, here he's going, he doesn't have his tools with him. It doesn't have anything else, so it would be interesting. The gifts may well have given them some opportunity to finance things. They were expensive gifts, gifts that would have done them well if they'd traded them out for money. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of the money from those gifts later, or those gifts showing up later.

So it's a good supposition. By the way, yeah, yeah. John's connection may well have been through his father and especially you see here his mother coming and making the request and all that. It's probably parent connections is how John got the in, not John himself. You don't see John spending any time developing that relationship. He just takes advantage of it. Yeah, it's interesting.

The Sanhedrin, for example Caiaphas, we found the bone box. The bone box seems to date Caiaphas at about 60 years of age. The Sanhedrin would have all been older guys that would have died. By the time you get into the letters of the New Testament, these guys are probably passed from the scene and you've got the next generation. You also don't see the Sanhedrin, when you look at the Book of Acts, the Sanhedrin coming onto the scene much after the first several chapters there. They seem to kind of fade off. That conflict seems to go away and you find things spreading out more later. Probably the first ten years before it was recognized that this message was for the Gentiles as well, it would have been the window of conflict and still having a lot of those guys there, the older generation there. But typically the Sanhedrin was older. Paul was probably in line to be on the Sanhedrin. Gamaliel, a respected member of the Sanhedrin, was his tutor. Gamaliel's grandfather was Hillel, the one that came up with the liberal Jewish court system.

We've got to quit. We've got folks wanting to get in here. Okay? Let's pray. Lord, thank you for this time. We thank you for the marvelous and fascinating things surrounding your first coming, and we look forward to your coming again. In Jesus' name, amen.